I'm opinionated on SAFE mode. I see how it's helpful to learn to fly, BUUUUUT...
My dad learned to fly the little UMX Radian with its SAFE technology. It became a crutch, because the SAFE autocorrects with a gyro. Now, as he's trying to learn to land the Apprentices through our flight school at my field, they have SAFE turned off because they want people to learn to deal with things like wind, and cross breezes on approach.
The attitude is that if you can learn to fly in the wind, you can fly pretty much anytime (unless your plane simply isn't powerful enough to handle it - which, in the case of most of the UMX machines, they're not meant for anything more than a 5 mph steady breeze). It's nice because at our field, around noon, the wind picks up a little, and a lot of the guys go home, because they have a hard time flying in the wind. Me, because I'm comfortable with it, I get to keep flying and pretty much have the skies to myself!
And funny you should mention the feeling of a stall...I was talking with a club member last weekend who is a full size aircraft pilot, and he learned to fly aerobatics and got checked out on Pitts style planes. He knew how to handle stalls and such because that was just one of those things he did with aerobatics. So, his instructor who was checking him off on a new plane (I think he said it was a Beechcraft? I don't remember exactly) got mad at him because he wanted him to do some sort of stall and recover. What the instructor failed to mention was, "Feel the stall, but don't ACTUALLY stall, just recover out of it BEFORE the stall actually happens."
So the pilot goes up, stalls it, and recovers, all based on his aerobatic experience, and had no problems with it. The instructor browbeat him for 15 minutes, saying it was a terrible stall, and the pilot said, "What? I didn't drift left or right, I kept it dead on, I just let the plane stall and dropped the nose, powered on, and recovered."
I guess that flying with the sticks for RC is going to be something similar when you start flying; obviously, if you try to fly the plane straight up, you're probably going to stall it, if you fly it knife edge, you're only going to have the rudder to give you the feeling of elevator...