Mark Dyger, thank you very much for your words. The learning curve of this area is fun, but some challanges are difficult to overcome, and criticism and comparisons are very harsh, so you never really know if you are doing ok. Thanks everyone for helping me with this issue.
I haven't read the other replies so its possible someone already covered this, but just in case they didn't... It's not cheating but they can be a bit of a crutch that you learn to do without after a while, for most things anyway. There are still somethings you will probably want to use a reference plane for but their use…