To be fair, the CAHA system pulls kids out of Valencia as well as every other club in the area, if you have aspirations to play AAA.
This is only the 4th year that Valencia has had a Tier program, and it's entirely built and run by one coach, so there's not much scalability to that. Just as an aside there were any number of 04-06 locals who had already gone to other programs by the time it was started, so the program had to be built back up, which takes a while.
That coach can only coach 2 teams, and even with 2, there are frequent times that coach can only be in one place at a time. He really doesn't have an assistant coach or coaches that are on anything close to an equal footing or partnership, and compared with some of the other clubs I think this is an area that could be improved upon. The U16 coach this season has coached off and on, including a few stints as the Jr. A coach, but from what I've heard, next year U16 will be coached again by the head Tier coach.
This same (head tier) coach told me his philosophy is entirely (paraphrasing here) "building individual player skills, and I don't care about anything else." This makes a lot of sense to me. With that said, being part of that program is an intense commitment of time and effort that probably equals what AAA teams undertake. Best pure bang for your buck in terms of ice time and dryland I know of in California.
The club itself, outside of all the good things that tier program is doing, has what seems to be an ongoing issue with the fact that the parents have really no input into the way the club is run. It's essentially administered by staff at the rink, and when CAHA or SCAHA policy is discussed or voted upon, VJF is MIA. This leads to the feeling that many parents have, that the club itself isn't interested in ways it could be run better, but that doesn't make Valencia unique nor unusual when compared to other clubs.