The stroke order of the examples you gave prioirtize centering the character. (飛 業)
The discrepancy between the middle part of 美 and something like 業 is whether the top to bottom stroke pierces the horizontal strokes or not. If it does not, the vertical stroke sets the area for the horizontal stroke while if it does, the horizontal strokes are first to set the stage for the stroke through.
A lot of stroke order is to promote writing the characters nicely.
Oh, and I’ll say that since I’m now past level 5 of Kanken, they’re never going to ask me about stroke order again. It’s just not a section on the higher levels. So while I’m not going out of my way to ignore stroke order, I no longer actively spend any energy thinking about it when I learn new characters.
Yeah - I meant to convey that. And if it wasn’t clear, they are characters I’ve had problems, but I’m not saying they’re still problematic. It’s a set of kanji that demonstrates the difficulty in intuiting the stroke order in light of how the “stroke order rules” tend to be oversimplified when presented.
An important take away is that I should revisit these rules now that I have hundreds more kanji that I’ve learned. I’ll bet I’ll find them more salient than before. In retrospect, I think I was too eager to get the jump on learning the proper stroke order principles…
ネプリーグ is the show that I most often find myself saying “oh my god what are you doing to that kanji” but the youtube uploads look pretty horrible, and I don’t have an example off the top of my head.
To be fair, I’ve never tried to write kanji for a chance to win prizes.
EDIT: Oh, and it’s not stroke order related, but one time on くりぃむクイズ ミラクル9 someone gave a crossword clue that was supposed to be 挟 but they wrote 狭 and the partner still understood and got the correct crossword answer. I don’t know if that’s impressive or not, and if it is, if it’s impressively good or impressively bad.
TLDR: Stroke order can appear more predictable depending on the style of the stroke order diagram.
Spent time with my Kanji workbook (Tuttle product) after this discussion. I had only breezed through it so far, but last night I came across two kanji that surprised me, sort of. The way that you see these two kanji in most screen fonts is slightly different, but that difference is important to me in terms of comprehension.
So on 曜 the screen font typically shows strokes 11 and 12 (⺅) connected to the remaining six strokes a la radical 73 ⾫ on (top of second image). You might call that radical turkey or small bird. Point being the script font used for the stroke diagram makes it clear to me that you can simply break this radical down into sub-graphemes if you will, and then the rules become much more intuitive to me because you do the left part first (11, 12) then the remaining strokes on the right are written like 主 with an extra horizontal stroke.
用 would not be what I call problematic now, but when I first learned it, it was not perfectly intuitive when you’d try to reconcile it against kanji that had similar geometry. Same thing applies here, I feel when you see the script font in the diagram and how strokes 3 and 4 don’t touch strokes 1 and 2, it’s easier to apply the patterns because it’s an enclosure (1, 2) with simple radical inside.