i agree with jols... while having fancy skills in your repertoire might make it simpler in your own head to execute a basic skill, the skill still needs to be done well, and often it takes effort. for example it takes more effort to turn, and then kick out of the turn to get a good front pass off, rather than turn, and flip a lazy backflick hoping for the same result... which is inevitably what people who learn to backflick do for a few months as they get used to using it well.
of course basics are king, there's no debate. the people you see in high level games who actually manage to pull off wacky moves regularly and actually make a decent contribution to their team (ie dont just swim around barrel-rolling every time they get the puck and generally being unhelpful) are the players who have decent basics already.
the danger is if kids grow up doing flash tricks which by their very nature often move the body higher from the bottom than usual (and making their position weaker) and learn these tricks before they learn basic stuff, and end up with terrible habits that are very hard to break later on. when i was in school me and my mates used to spend a lot of time mucking around with skills.... but most of it was basic curls, tic-tacs, dummies and sidesteps, all of it flat on the bottom... that was pretty much all there was to practice!
but schoolkids in wellington today might not be practicing those things anymore.... well maybe if they have a good coach they hopefully will. if more skills were around back then we'd have been swimming round upside down too, but the fact remains that often kids now enter high grade games with bad habits because they havent practised basics enough.... and as jols says, easiest example of this is guys not even being able to stay on the bottom properly, swimming around trying to make tackles 40 cm off the tiles and wondering why the opposition can just reach under them and take the puck back. used to be if you had a young guy on your team, he just wasn't quite as fast or strong as older players and didn't have much breathold or determination due to confidence... now you can add to that the fact that they often try silly skills and options in stupid places, which has to be drilled out of them, and they generally dont have very good basic tackles.
i'm a big advocate for circus tricks, but basics first, tricks after.