zombie84 said:

I don't think it's a contradiction. Yoda is saying there is nothing more he can teach him, but that he still needs to confront Vader to graduate; confronting Vader isn't something Yoda can provide so this is something Luke needs to seek out. I think in fighting Vader in ESB, and learning from that and meditating on it, and practicing in the months since then, he is in the place that Yoda wished he was at the end of ESB--capable of taking on Vader, emotionally and physically--and now he just needs to go ahead and finally do it.

This is what I've always thought. By confronting Vader and not succumbing to the Dark Side at a very emotionally vulnerable stage, showing that he would rather die than to join the Dark Side, despite the fact that his own, long-lost father was asking him to, he proved that he was indeed ready to be a Jedi.

At that point, whatever else Yoda might have wanted to teach Luke during ESB was moot because Luke had already surpassed it with real experience.

I think that, if you take the prequels into account, the confrontation on Cloud City also showed Yoda that maybe he had a thing or two to learn himself and that maybe the Jedi Order's teachings were flawed all this time; that maybe this young upstart was actually more right about what it is to be a Jedi than Mr. 900-year-old, "my-own-counsel-I-will-keep" professional Jedi Grandmaster did, and I feel that this is proven at the end of ROTJ when Yoda and Ben look on at Luke proudly alongside Anakin (who not long before they had written off entirely): they acknowledged that their way of doing things was wrong, that they had been dealing in absolutes themselves (Anakin being irredeemable), that there's no such thing as "too far gone", that anyone can be saved, and perhaps things like emotions and attachments are not so bad after all.

For the record, though, I also agree that Yoda's death was kinda lamely handled.