Interesting. I preflighted flew the Raptor for a club member some time ago. It flew fine and I was able to grease it in on the first try. That said, I would NOT want to teach a completely green pilot on it. I would agree that the large WWI biplanes are challenging. Flying an airplane with a tailskid on an asphalt runway in a crosswind is not my idea of fun. The large frontal area and multiple wings make for lots of form drag and induced drag (respectively). I've seen more than one WWII warbird go down when trying to land due to nothing other than pilot error. I've personally flown and landed a P-38 on a single engine. The critical engine (left engine) failed due to old plumbing that sucked in air. It was woefully underpowered on a single engine, and there was negative climb performance. Got it down gently on the runway using the same engine out techniques that I was taught for full-scale twins, but wasn't fun. It was probably the most difficult thing I've done in my modeling career.

Some students have primary trainers and I still fear teaching them. There's more to teaching than the airplane.....

One student had an airplane I called the "Jinx." I would meticulously preflight the thing and find nothing wrong. Once it was in the air all heck seemed to break loose. It once had an aileron stuck in the down position right after takeoff, that was fun. Lift off the ground and have the thing make an ever increasing bank. The only way to shallow the bank was to pitch down to get enough air over the working aileron to counteract the broken one. Turning could only be done in one direction. The touchdown on that flight was firm.