: You say, "use a block plane for this", and when it doesn’t work you
: say, "Oh, it’s not the fault of the technique, it’s just that you
: don’t know what SHARP is. Go back and learn to sharpen your plane."

: This is exactly why this is the wrong tool for the novice to use in this
: application.

How does a novice know when a scraper need to be sharpened? If a novice gets tear out and chatter with a scraper what would you tell him? Does the fact that you might need to reiterate some instructions or explain a little more how to use the tool eliminate it as a good tool for a novice? Is it the fault of the tool or the technique that it is possible to use a scraper wrong. By your criteria a tool must work perfectly for everyone regardless of their experience before you recommend it to a novice. If this is the case, then novices will never progess beyond blunt tipped scissors.

Yes, you need to learn how to use a plane. Yes, you need to learn how to sharpen it. Yes, there are some places that a plane won't work great. Yes, you will need to spend a little time sharpening your plane before you use it. You can say exactly the same for a scraper.

You must learn how to use a scraper. Used improperly it can rip chunks out of your boat or create deep tears in the wood grain. You must learn how to sharpen it. With the wrong angle it will either be ineffective or do worse damage. You may have to have different scapers for different places. One scraper in not enough for all situations. It takes less time to sharpend a scraper than a plane, but they also need sharpening more often. The times tends to balance out. And how does the novice know when it needs to be sharpened? By your criteria anyone who experiences any problems with a scraper was simply told to use the wrong tool not that they need to go back and learn how to do it right. If you think it is impossible to have bad results with a scraper, you are sadly mistaken and doing a disservice to novice builders.

You must also learn how to use a ROS. Placing a spinning sander on your boat may dig a horse shoe depression before you think to move it. Should we eliminate the ROS as a tool because it is possible to make a rookie mistake? Sure, you need to use the tool improperly to do this damage, but the same is true of any tool. It is not enough to cause me to throw it out of the novice's tool box.

It is a mistake to imply that by using a specific tool a novice will have no problems. It is also a mistake to suggest that just because a tool can have problems, that novices should not use them. I would rather tell people the whole range of possible tools and let them learn from experience, then to limit their selection to a few specific tools and never learn the possiblities of others.

I suggest novices use scrapers and random orbital sander and yes, block planes despite the fact that they can be used wrong.