It was after riding 210 days on inflatables, with a total of 553 hours on the water (according to my log), so it wouldn't be fair to say I was "not competent" or "having trouble". At the time I was getting pretty big jumps, & cranking high-g turns, about the same as now.
With LEIs I had no real problems that required "resolution". In fact I never even had any of the common problems like leaky bladders, breaking pumps, or delaminating or herneating struts (although somebody did steal a pump I left on the beach while riding, which of course couldn't happen with an ARC). However you might consider it a problem that my local launch nearly always requires landing an LEI in the water, yet an ARC can be easily solo landed on dry land. That is a big factor for me. Auto-zenith, self-inflation, etc. were just bonuses.
Because nobody sent me to a file like
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kitesurf/ ... %20ARC.htm
it took me about 30 hours of ARC use before I was able to attain equal performance to the LEIs I'd been riding (which were current at the time). I wrote that file in order to help others make the switch more easily. From all the reports I've been seeing (mostly at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arcusers/messages) it would appear that the 2003 model has once again caught up (at least) to current LEI performance, even though it may have lagged somewhat in 2002 (not counting the F-ARC, with it's high performance but low waterlaunchability).