Personally I hate the CRP's, but I find my little Jepp wheel invaluble.
Pre-flight planning should be as accurate as possible, even though we aren't able to fly to within a deg. or two and the w/v is an approximation sometimes, why build more error into it in the first place?
Using something like the clockcode whilst in flight is a very sensible thing, but expecting people to do fairly complex calculations in their head without making a mistake is asking a bit much unless these are practiced regularily. This goes for pre-flight planning aswell.
I'm very surprised to hear that the RAF don't teach what I consider to be a fairly fundamental thing. I suppose 10 kts of drift doesn't matter as much when you are doing 600+kts!