Andrew,
I'm not trying to knock you or put you down in any way, but I think you are worried about things that aren't really a problem.
well if i do damage the nose wheel in a rough landing
I've flown quite a few planes with nose gear on them and I've found that it's really pretty hard to damage them to the point that they are unusable. The gear themselves have a spring coil that allows the gear to flex backwards as you land and that will absorb a lot of "rough treatment" from rough landings. The plane in this picture is my Balsa USA Thunderbug and you can see that it's got a nosegear on it (you don't always have to have a taildragger just because you advance to a more advanced plane). This plane is my "throw around" plane. Everybody should have a throw around plane because they are the plane that you don't really care too much if you crash them, and you're not worried about trying new things with them. This plane had 164 flights on it last summer and trust me, I've really abused the landing gear on it. A flying buddy of mine and I worked last summer on doing formation touch and go landings. This means that we flew the approach side by side and tried to touchdown at the same time on the runway. Because of this there are a lot of times that I force the plane to land very hot, which is very rough on the landing gear because of the speed of the plane and because of forcing the plane down. The gear held up with no problems at all. The most that I had to do was to bend the nose gear back forward a bit every few weeks.
As for your last question about an easy landing gear to "plug in" if you do go to a taildragger setup. Use the Sullivan tail wheel assemblies. They are really easy to add to a plane because they have a spring wire that is connected to the bottom of the rudder to provide steering for your plane. I also like the spring for steering because it isolates the rudder from hard turns on the runway because the spring absorbs the shock. You can find them at Tower Hobbies here:
[link]http://www2.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXFV46&P=0[/link]
Hope this helps
Ken