Well...I've been flying for about 2 years now.

I fly at least 3-4 days a week usually and haul my planes out to the field with a trailer so I'm not the "average" person who has flown 2 years...

Anyway I never liked a trainer, about 6 months after i soloed I tried flying someone elses trainer (by then I was into 1/4 scale aerobatics) and it was a pain in the butt to fly again. I like a plane that will start to loose altitude (not dive just loose it) when the throttle is brought back. Trainers have the knack of just slowing down...slowing down...slowing down and then you push them over to loose altitude and they gain airspeed and gain more lift - bad cirlcle.

To me the self righting etc... of a trainer was the biggest pain when trying to learn how to fly. I got rid of those and got into more scale aerobatic planes - edges/extras and caps that go where I point them.

I taught a friend how to fly this summer, he learned from day one on my Gene Soucy Extra 300 1/4 scale with an OS 1.60 that I don't fly anymore. He never had a problem with it at all and now can do amazing things with it. I think it depends on the person, how fast they react and how fast they can absorb things in relation to the speed of the model. I think instructors make a big mistake with the whole - push the stick this way if X wing drops or the "look over the shoulder" technique. To me this invite disaster. I always tell my students when learning the best way to learn how to get out of stuff is to know what you did to get into it. I like them to pretend they are inside flying the plane, you make a left bank, it will take a right bank to get out of it etc...You can learn to react later to the plane - which you really only ever need to do in a violent tubmle manavuer when your not exactly sure when you'll run out of energy and what attitude the plane is in - other than that I can't think of another time in flying when you won't know how to right the plane or get it to do what you want.

But to each his own and what makes you comfortable, some people might get too nervous learning on a $1000 1/4 scale plane - some won't. I was never a fan of crash/buy/crash way of learning. In my 2 years I've crashed one plane, when the fuel tubing came off my saito .72 on my extreme flight edge while in a knife edge hover in 15 mph wind - looked great till the engine died and the wingtip hit first while going backwards from the wind.