The last bit of this debate comes down to whether what is taught in the PPL is enough to enable you to fly to your licence privileges.
Objectively the answer has to be NO (what's the legal minimum horizontal visibility, and can it be navigated visually, by a 50-hour-total-time PPL?)
Visual navigation is easy once you can fly the plane almost subconsciously, but that takes far more than 50 hours on type, perhaps 300 hours for the average pilot and that's assuming reasonably recent currency too. Until then, the workload is high enough to make the flight hard work rather than enjoyable. But most pilots with many hours have long forgotten what it is like, hence statements like "you can fly anywhere with purely map reading" (which is technically correct of course).
This is why I think radio navigation should be taught properly within the PPL. This is controversial but nowhere near as controversial (VOR tracking and VOR/VOR position fix are in the syllabus) as a mere mention of GPS.
The trouble is that whenever anyone suggests teaching ANYTHING other than visual navigation, fifty people will weigh in with the old argument that doing so will detract from visual nav skills.....
If you want to get people jumping around, go into a room full of grey-haired PPL instructors and mention "GPS". It is like the abolition of the closed shop.
In the end all this is almost irrelevant, because some 90-95% of fresh PPLs vote with their feet and chuck it all in pretty quickly, and those who fly decent journeys almost without exception use GPS and VOR/DME and don't spent much time posting in this forum
