ORIGINAL: ssautter
My point is that landing gear presents another variable, which new ''teach-yourself-to-fly'' pilots often struggle with.
Very true. Many, many advantages to belly-landing and hand-launch. IMO, much the preferred configuration for learning.
Remove the gear and you become less dependent upon runway' surface ... less dependent upon runway direction ... roundout and hold-off become less critical... you experience far less airframe damage, attributable to landing and departing ... in general, the pace of learning is increased.
You do sacrifice some loss of speed -stability and of visual clues to orientation. On the whole, a good trade-off, imo.
Oh yeah ... it might be "renegade" over there ... over here, we call it "guerilla flying".