Hi FNG!
It's been a couple of hours, and nobody's zapped you yet!
I think that many of us are / were under-confident as newly qualified PPLs. I know that I was. It took me a good 20 hours before I flew with a passenger, a bit more than that before I asked for a class D airspace transit, and more still before I stopped finding excuses for not flying if there was a crosswind...:o A few years on, and these problems which used to cause anxiety all seem pretty trivial.
Under-confidence can, in my experience, best be cured by patience and friendly explanation. It's certainly much more likely to succeed than sarcasm. When I started mountain flying a couple of years ago, I was reluctant to fly close to the mountainside - which is something that one has to be able to do. It made me nervous, and I'd find alternative ways that avoided having to do it. Amazingly, and with the patient help of an instructor with over 20,000 hours mountain flying experience, I discovered that the air molecules near the mountain were just the same as those further away, and that there was nothing to be anxious about as long as I understood what I was doing. From his position of experience, he could have been sarcastic about my wimpishness, but I don't think it would have helped much.
It's not really a big deal if people ask questions they should know the answer to. It's better to ask than to go on being ignorant. Yes, there are other ways of finding the answers - but on the positive side, I'm sure a lot of people have read this thread who had never crossed the channel and who now have a better understanding of what's involved thanks to some of the replies.