My opinion is different. This is as someone who, under the old system, got assigned a training date by the company that conflicted with an important family event. Sent out God knows how many emails to try and switch training dates (yeah... that was a great system), had to do a three-way trade because someone was butt-hurt that someone junior was going to training ahead of them. Finally after collecting all those emails and getting the training date moved, ended up having my new training date again moved by the company to conflict with the family event again.

Under this system (if you have any modicum of seniority) can at least bypass dates that don't work for you, and won't be forced to go to training when you don't want.

Do I wish we had small monthly bids? Absolutely. Do I wish we could bid for training spots in those small bids? Hell, yes. Is this system better than what we had? Absolutely.