Isn't avoiding trouble better than fighting?

Yes. I will say it before you do.

Every real fight is a coin flip you did not need to toss. Concrete. A friend of his behind you. A camera. A knife you did not see. A lawyer afterwards. Nobody who has been around this for twenty-five years thinks winning one is a good outcome. Not getting into one is the good outcome.

Here is the part people miss. Training makes you better at avoiding it, not worse.

The first reason is ego. Most street fights start because somebody could not stand being disrespected in front of people. When you already know what you can do, that pressure falls off a cliff. You can eat an insult in a parking lot and drive home, because you are not using the moment to find out something about yourself. The men I have known who were genuinely dangerous were the calmest people in the room, and it was not an act. They had nothing left to prove.

The second is reading. Once you have had hands on you a few hundred times in a garage, you notice things. The shift in weight. The closing distance. The hand that goes behind the back. The question that is not really a question. You leave while it is still only a situation.

So the order I teach is: notice, leave, talk, and only then hands. Distance, exits, voice. Loud and early works more often than anything you can throw, and it costs you nothing but looking a bit dramatic in front of strangers you will never see again.

The practical version is mostly habits. Park where you can see the car. Keep a hand free. Do not put headphones in both ears walking to the door at night. Cross the road early instead of standing there working out whether you need to. That matters double when it is a group rather than one person, because more than one person is never a fight you win. None of it is dramatic and all of it works. See the single most important self-defense skill.

None of this means sport training is useless for the street. It is the opposite, and how sport martial arts holds up in a real situation goes through what carries and what does not.

When it is already on you, that is what the rest of these answers are about. The skill is worth having. I hope you never spend it.