I guess clipping the wings depends a lot on how you want the plane to look as well as how you want it to act.

After dropping one bay, the plane's still a floater, but the change is appearance is already noticeable. Dropping two bays, you're take a model of a 36' span plane and fitting it with the scale equivalent of about a 25' wing... at that point it may act like a highly modified T-Craft, but it doesn't look like one of those and it really doesn't look much anymore like the L-4 it was supposed to be either.

So, if I were going to the trouble of altering the fuselage to make it more scale-like, I don't think I'd go for clipping the wings -- my preference. If I wanted to shorten the glide in a stand-off scale Grasshopper, I'd add some split flaps. They can be done without changing the appearance (if you really want them not to show, you can bring them forward of the trailing edge without losing their aerodynamic effect.)