SNIP

What i'm saying is that learning 'the code' shows that a person has a little
more commitment to the hobby, and probably won't abuse their priveliges
because they had to work hard to get them.

SNIP

Personally, I found that theory galling in 1967 or so when, after much
effort and expense to travel to an FCC testing facility, I flunked the 13
WPM for a general.

I loved building radios and wanted to make more of them.  As a novice, I
traded 2 or 3 QSL cards and got very bored with that, and enjoyed some of my
rag chewing sessions, but face-to-face at a club meeting was easier and more
enjoyable.  What I really liked was building stuff.

So I quit ham radio in frustration.  To me, it felt like most of the ham
radio community was in some kind of time-warp, stuck in the 1920's when it
was a real accomplishment to pound a few dots and dashes to distant places
-- and it was when you had to wind your own coils to do it.  But to order a
couple of boxes from a catalog and then learn an arcane and obsolete skill
to play with them just seemed silly to me.

So it's been over 30 years since I was a ham.  In the meantime (as a
computer programmer, no less), I've built radios for a living at two
different places, because doing it for a living was a lot more interesting
than playing silly games with off-the-shelf radios.

So I heartily approve of dumping the code altogether, outlawing ready-made
radios, and moving ham radio back to its technical roots.  Any kind of
modulation on any legal band, the weirder the better, as long as you built
it yourself.  That might even save the hobby.