There are some pearls of wisdom in this thread, and there is a lot of fluffy-minded tosh. Your problem is you have absolutely no way of knowing which is which for certain
I dont understand comments like these which so often pop up on PPruNe.
The interest in these forums is to debate the issue and hopefully to be informative, otherewise we might as well not bother.
It would be far more helpful to quote the bits that are tosh and tell us why or even the pearls of wisdom and tell us why. It is easy on the other hand to simply say some bits are tosh. It is for a similar reason why I object when people say - dont do so and so without any justification. It always leaves me wondering if they are just repeating what they read somewhere without understanding why. This forum is a good example. So far as I am concered flying in company is good fun and not at all dangerous if done with a sensible pre flight briefing. I have expalined why I beleive that is so and set out what I consider to be a reasonable brief. Flying in formation or tactical formation is a different matter.
We are all here to learn.
A good point in isolation about chatting to other pilots at the posters local airfield however.