My kids don't go to school, but we use the Saxon books for math here at home. They are so well put together. Incremental development. Enough consistent repetition of core concepts. All lessons back reference the fundamentals/foundations with a simple indexing system.
As a homeschool graduate who used Saxon through high school, I agree with your assessment. The one issue I took with Saxon is that the original example problems when introducing a new concept were too easy. I was able to grok how to solve the problems for the first 5-10 lessons, without actually understanding the principles behind them. When the problems grew harder and actually required applying the concepts, I'd have to backtrack a couple of weeks. A bit of a bugger, but all in all I liked Saxon a lot.
I thought Saxon badly needed to be broken apart into discrete subjects and accelerated. Other than that, it wasn't bad. Certainly parsecs ahead of the public school texts I saw at the time.
