Current instructor but unfortunately somewhere that you can't fly GA.
Its all to do how you were taught the first exercises. Personally I am anal retentive about attitute flying and trimming. You are not flying by the seat of your pants when you are doing this by looking out the window.
In the circuit you get the student to stick a bit of the plane on the runway on the down wind and look at the picture. On the PA38 and that sort of type its the wing tip and on a C172 its the tie down bolt on the wing strut.
Then to get the circuit height you just get the picture to match what you want it to be. Power you set by ear then adjust and thats it.
Same on approach get the picture right and configuration right and everything works.
Its pefectly normal for a student who was chasing needles with +- 5 knots and +-100ft in the circuit to get within +- 2 knots and 20ft all in a couple of circuits with no instruments. After that if you are horrible you can throw a bad wx circuit at them at 600ft and 9 times out of 10 they will be bang on 600ft without even showing them the new picture. PFLs again it comes into its own being able to judge your height and speed off attitude and is further refined in that exercise to the point that when you start doing land aways the student can do it with an unfamilar field and still get it pretty much spot on with one quick glance at the alt to confirm that its right.
After they can do this the amount of released capacity is huge. No more panic on the downwind, base etc and all you have to do is get the flare sorted and you throw them off solo.
Day VFR in a fixed prop aircraft in class G it really won't bother me two hoots if all the instruments packed. And for my ex students I don't think it would bother them to much either.
If you can go and do a CRI course at ontrack and it will become very obvious what I am on about after a couple of hours in the RHS.