I too have a dislike of airborne gadgets, many of which slither about on the CAA's laminated chart and end up on the floor..... But pre-flight planning using the simple old Dalton is a different matter. It takes no more than a minute or so for a triangular route and the forecast wind is normally of sufficient accuracy for a typical 50 mile leg. Then it's 'Heading and time' between pre-planned fixes, correcting heading and ETA estimates by in-flight observation, not re-planning the whole leg after wind-finding which I find something of an over-complication for PPL level navigation. The difference with 'unplanned' diversion flying is that map reading is required to back up in-flight estimates to a somewhat greater extent than on planned legs.
Arrive at the 1/4 way fix with an error of 20 seconds between planned and achieved time would normally require a turning point ETA correction of 80 seconds by conventional proportional timing correction. But if 10 of those seconds were due to 'near enough' MDR planning and 10 were down to the wind, an 80 sec correction would clearly be incorrect. And it doesn't take much more to put you outside the timing error limit acceptable for the PPL Skill Test.
I shall stick to teaching the conventional wisdom of measuring twice and cutting once. Accurate pre-flight planning using the best forecast wind using a whizz-wheel; Standard Closing Angle and Proportional Timing in-flight, MDR using max drift and clock face for diversions, backed up with slightly more map reading (NOT track crawling) during the diversion.