That sounds rather elitist, really. I am by no means an 'advanced flyer', but I am certainly prepared to take a calculated risk. And nothing in life is risk-free; it just depends on one's appetite. For instance, I booked a fare on a single ticket DEN-DFW-LHR-FCO with a 40 min connection in DFW because the price was right, but I reckoned a 50% chance of missing the connection, and even though the connection is protected, I did not want to have to fork out for a night at the Grand Hyatt on account of missing the last flight to LHR, so I have been waiting ever since for a schedule change to get myself on an earlier DEN-DFW flight.

On the other hand, I am contemplating booking PER-AKL, AKL-JFK on two separate tickets with a 14 hour layover in AKL, again because the price is right. Now, there is a chance I will not make the long-haul segment, which would be a bit of a disaster, but I figure that my chances of misconnecting are less than 5%, which I am prepared to accept. It would have been prohibitively expensive to book this on a single ticket, so, to say that neophyte flyers should only book protected itineraries would be tantamount to suggesting, at least in my case, that I should just stay home, as ijgordon rather drolly pointed out.