purpose of drills

The purpose of a drill is to “sharpen your blade”.  When doing applications, your defensive and offensive weapons may get messy.  Drills are a means of perfecting the form.  If you are good at doing the drill version of a technique, you should be able to do the application version without overcompensation.  Drills teach you not to over shoot your defensive/offensive moves.  In applications, you will either over or under shoot and this can render the technique wild or ineffective.