Well, yes. All the more reason to not piss anyone off more than necessary.
The training/check-ride isn't meant as a punishment or a hazing. It is intended to help and make the experience more productive for players that need it.
It has been so long since I started this game my memory is a little hazy but I have to say that if I had been compelled to go through a "Lets Practice A Take Off" and "This Is How You Do a Split S, Now You Try" kind of training I would have been very pissed off. What I remember is that I watched a video by...by...the guy who...BBosen on setting up views and set up my views so easily compared to any sim I had or have flown. After that the biggest problem I had was finding information in one easy to find coherent place, this was the most remarkable aspect of the game, (remarked to me by other people who were trying it out,) there IS no manual. You kind of learn from other players and osmosis and multiple BBS posts and ancient pages from the website and the wiki obsolete pages. When I see a clown posting a video of their inability to take off I am pretty sure they expect to be able to play with a mouse like it is an arcade. I think what you could do for those folks is just not have them take off but rather dump them into the air like War Online Pacific does, they need repetition just to sort out the controls, and they need on screen reminders about how the mouse is controlling the flight surfaces and something that tells them what to press for the throttle, make those things permanent until they get enough time playing that they can choose to turn them off, or something.
With regard to the mandated training, I don't think you should mandate it but instead try making it interesting enough that someone will do it for enjoyment. I don't really play any video games so my experience is very limited but I have never seen a tutorial that was not just staggeringly dull, so I think this is a real challenge and would take a lot of time and talent to create. If I was to try something I would streamline the new player experience and give them as little choice as possible until they had played a bit. I imagine and experience of slowly broadening access based not upon completing a training regimen but on flight time. A brand new player might not actually find all of the choice involved appealing as it is too much to keep track of and they are just looking for the key that moves the throttle up and down.
I think War Online Pacific was a good stab in this direction. Unfortunately for AH players the flight model was kind of bad with negative transfer back to AH. There was some confusion about who you were supposed to shoot and there was no story or ability to create a story in it. (What I mean by story is flying somewhere to attack it and coming back or something even more complex.)
Bottom line is I see the training thing has to be part of game play, has to be enjoyable, has to be snuck in. I think training is very easily a turn off so beware.
