Huggy and Grandad,
The problem is one of us wanting to provide the very best service to you all, but crews just not keeping us in the picture. I guess Spotter was coming from the direction that if you know for a fact before you roll you will be keeping the gear down for longer than normal on departure, say 20 or 30 seconds, let us know for the reasons Spotter stated. If you decide to do it after take-off or suffer a failure, fine - tell us when you are ready.
Another good example of not being kept in the picture is trying to fit visual approaches in. I've found myself working on a CAVOK day vectoring traffic that normally request visuals day-in-day-out, and when you have set up the sequence expecting their request, the subject aircraft ends up taking the ILS despite my offer of "report if you get the field in sight and wish to make a visual approach". Now I appreciate there are many reasons why the crew may want the ILS, but if you get the feeling we are setting the sequence up to get you in visual (pointing you at a two mile final, dropping to circuit height are good clues
), tell us if you really want the ILS. This is partly our fault for making assumptions based on what normally happens, but it only comes back to my first point - we only want to provide the best service to you all.