If you knew me, you would know I am far from rude. I stated IMHO (in my honest opinion) that your opening statement was rubbish. I wasn't calling into question your ability, merely being forthright in ensuring that ATCnoob understood that your statement was not something to hang their hat on in the early days of training.
Sometimes you have to make a bold statement to get a message across (especially if it is at odd with other 'advice').
Not being of a sensitive disposition, I don't let those sort of things get to me if they are ever directed my way. Especially when they are used to make a valid point!
I answered strongly because you had made a bold statement, supposedly giving advice, to a confessed early-doors student who specifically asked about strips as they were having a problem. Reading between the lines ATCnoob has probably been picked up for this more than once, hence asking for advice here.
Fortunately ATCnoob doesn't sound like he/she has taken that little gem about radar being the most important thing away and decided to black hole it on radar...
In the early days of training at NATS college and on unit at TC, we try to make people understand how important strips are. Strips are more important than radar IMHO for one reason - if radar goes tits up (an unlikely scenario in a multi radar environment I agree), you can still have good go at sorting out the mess with strips and RT.
Even people who haven't trained in procedural control (unfortunately people leaving NATS college on area tickets fall into this category now - probably something that has changed since you trained and something that does show when students arrive on unit), would be able to use common sense to cleaer what flights they had in sector using a very basic type of procedural service with lots of pilot reporting.
As you yourself go on to say later, strips can get you out of trouble in dire times. However, to enable to do this, a controller must have a good strip scan system in place to fall back on. Therefore at this point in time, at early stages of training, strip scan is probably at least as important than looking at radar.
As they get more and more experienced, they will rely less on strips and will use all the information (in whatever form) available to them to make their jobs as easy as possible. In the early days of training, as ATCnoob is, strips and the scan take up a far larger portion of time, due to undeveloped scan, lack of familiarity with sector and procedures, lack of familiarity with the type of aircraft and profiles in that sector.
I've said my bit, hopefully ATCnoob will have found some useful stuff somewhere in all of the replies above after posting the queston - several variations on theme with regard to scanning including from you, Scooby, who rightly says that unit to unit it may differ slightly.