For martial artists in wuxia, what he/she learns at the very foundation/beginning of his/her training can greatly determine the direction and extent to which his/her skills eventually develop, even if those early skills are, in of themselves, not particularly great or formidable. Witness Gwok Jing in LOCH: he started off training with the Gong Nam 7 Freaks' martial arts - not exactly world-beating stuff, but provided him the sturdy foundation he needed to learn much greater skills later on.
When Yeung Gor developed his ultimate skill of the Sad Palms, he synthesized the many different skills he had learned during his youth into a new skill that had certain attributes of all of them. The Sad Palms is described as a skill that combines tremendous raw power with unusual, counter-intuitive strokes that are extremely difficult to read and counter. Despite being called Sad *Palms*, it's actually a full-body skill that uses many parts of the body to attack.
Doesn't that sound familiar? You bet it does. It sounds *a lot* like West Poison Au Yeung Fung's skills - particularly after he tried to combine his twisted faux 9 Yum Jen Ging skills with his native Ha Mo Gung technique.
Yeung Gor learned his first significant martial arts skills from Au Yeung Fung. Although Au Yeung Fung didn't teach Yeung Gor that much, what Yeung Gor did learn of the Ha Mo Gung became the foundation for all the myriad skills he would gain in the years ahead. Thus, it's not surprising that the Sad Palms came to resemble faux-9 Yum Ha Mo Gung to a great extent.
This raises the question: if Yeung Gor hadn't learned Au Yeung Fung's Ha Mo Gung skills, but nevertheless learned those many other skills that he later did, would it have made a notable difference in the path of his martial arts development? Would Sad Palms have ended up looking/working very differently?