A frightening aircraft, no; exhilarating and exciting, definitely.
I think it helped that we had mostly trained on that great Lightning trainer the Gnat, although one chap on my OCU course was heard to complain that the only previous swept-wing aircraft he had flown was the Tiger Moth. First problem was trying to get your wheels up after take-off without exceeding the limiting speed of 250kt, the acceleration was amazing. I never thought that it had any bad flying habits; it normally gave plenty of warning of a spin for example, and would recover, eventually. Incidentally, years after my only Lightning tour I was converting to the Tornado. The 67° swept wing approach was considered to be quite a handful; I thought it was just like a Lightning approach.