Hi Blagger, just to add my weight to the other comments ... a few years ago I did a weightshift conversion with the idea of instructing and examining in them, but having converted I decided that it would take so long to become sufficiently proficient to deal with student errors and tricky conditions that it was not sensible to continue. FWIW I had a few thousand hours and had been an FI/FE for SEPL, MEPL and sailplanes for a loong time, plus reasonable experience on 3-axis microlights and having found R22s easy to fly.
YMMV, of course.
Edited to add: the worry wasn't the apparent control reversal in flight (a complete non-issue), it was the roll response to turbulence, the change in roll response with airspeed and directional control on the ground
HFD