The sad part is that a lot of people in this hobby miss out on the big learning curve related to thrust, lift, drag, and basic aeronautical engineering because they just fly ARF's, or RTF planes.
When you build from scratch, or do a major kit bash, the real learning begins. If you can use the engineering spreadsheets and plug in some numbers it saves a lot of crashes due to trial and error. You don't need a math degree to use a lot of the programs we have available now.