I went to the Cierva lecture last night at the RAS, and very much enjoyed Frank's talk.
I'm probably a bit of a Robinson sceptic, but found the development history and the reasoning behind the design decisions fascinating.
The delivery was quite slow but very precise and the audience was hanging onto his every word. He talked for about 90mins and spent quite a bit of time on his childhood and early career.
Whenever he discussed the the design details of anything - flexible joints, tail rotor, rotor head, cyclic, etc, - he always said "...and it works just fine".
Seemed to jump from the R22 to R66, so not much specific discussion about the R44. He did say that he really wanted a diesel power plant for the next generation Robinson, but just could not get the weight down, and the RR300 turbine was the best possible alternative.
He took questions at the end, which was also very interesting, but time over-ran.