God forbid you should do something that's tough while training for a job where you hold other people's live in your hands!

Legal or not, there's the right way to do it and the easy way to do it. The whole point of training is to put you in "tough" situations so that when you have 3 passengers on board your single engine plane and you have an electrical failure, you can find your way back home safely. May as well do it once under the umbrella of your CFI before it happens with 3 other people freaking out.

This is kind of like sending a student out for a solo x-country with a GPS. Every pilot should be able to navigate using pilotage and dead reckoning ONLY. If you can follow a pink line on a screen, it shouldn't be that much more difficult to follow a road, or fly a heading and read a clock.

Take the time to gain more tools and THEN flying becomes easy because you have the right tools for the right situations. Pneumatic tools are really nice when you're doing a project, but when your compressor breaks, you better have some hand tools to get the job done.