Of course people should do what they feel like. The problem is that most beginners want to be the next world champ in a week and start with the advanced stuff and end up sounding like shit for a long time. I've experienced myself how hard it is to get rid of bad habbits because of moving ahead technically before being ready (I had the basics down hampster style, but changed to regular style and started learning all the tech ish before learning all the basics over again regular style). Flares are more technical than a lot of the basics, but I actually think it's harder to get transforms down tight and sounding right at various tempos than one click flare orbits. Same goes with chirps and tears. But flares has a much more complex sound and it takes much more practice to hear what sounds right and tight, both when others do it and (especially) when you do it yourself. It's much easier to sound like shit when it comes to flares. If you do some of the basic techniques you can actually be a little sloppy and still sound pretty good, because we're all used to old school cuts which tended to be a bit sloppy sometimes. You can get pretty "soulful" with sloppy chirps and transforms while it's pretty much impossible to sound good with sloppy flares. When learning all the advanced stuff first I think the whole learning process takes much longer time because of two things: You need to get a much higher understanding of how scratching "should" sound to even do anything that sounds good (to a trained ear), and you probably have to learn a lot of shit over again because you have so much bad habbits and all your "fundamentals" (which you in fact lack) is mad sloppy and untight. I'd rather listen to someone who has been scratching for 3 months who are basic and clean than someone who has been scratching for 1-2 years (or more) who are technical but unclean. Peeps in the last category is mostly what I hear, and they totally doesn't understand it themselves. Of course this is a bit individual, I've heard peeps who has been scratching for a short period who only do advanced stuff and still sound good. But generally I think most people are better off starting with the basics.