Conventional Gear, I agree.
Generally it's not normal, even at a completely uncontrolled field, though not necessarily entirely unusual. Nor was that an 'attaboy'. Normally the position reports suffice. If anything I suspect the training point is better situational awareness, but that's something that comes with time.
I take the point about requesting traffic, but that is less direct, takes more time, and in many cases the radio operator may well not have the circuit under observation. Maybe it's a culture difference, but there seems to be an attitude that ground services are there to tell us what to do, rather than to facilitate our needs.
I seem to recall that there's a catchall somewhere in air law that says the PIC can do basically what they want if they percieve safety to be an issue, just be prepared to justify your actions later
