soupdragon, you do delight in undermining my every thought, do you not..? (actually just corrected that typo from my original 'underminging' which i rather prefer).
i really do think the bumbos are bad news, and one of those reasons is that the babies can't pick up the food that they want to pick up.
sometimes if i think dd is hungry i'll put a few things out, sometimes just one if i think not, but i do believe that in terms of BLW there is some merit in the babies being allowed to choose whether to pick it up or not, when they want to.
so if an adult is there saying 'come on darling, take this from mummy' because she needs to stick the dishwasher on/stir a pot/write a novel/crochet a bobble hat then it places a different pressure on the child. plus, when dd drops things by accident she is by and large able to find them again on her tray, bib or down the side of the chair and that can be tricky in the bumbo because they are kind of pinned in there by gravity.
i take your point, however, that the babies like to flip things off their highchair tray. i can't imagine that it would be different in a puree-fed child, only that they wouldn't get the opportunity. i understand that it's a developmental issue, throwing things off heights to see what happens to them, dd does it with toys if she's standing up at the table in the sitting room as well.
in fact, dd's very favourite thing to do once she has finished eating is to pour water onto the table, splash her hands into it, make a paste out of whatever food remains and then flick it casually onto the curtains and walls. Having observed this little post-prandial routine a number of times i am now wary of letting her get past stage three but to be honest she enjoys it so much that i would feel bad about preventing her from doing it altogether.
i know that babydragon is being, at the very least, capricious about weaning, but i've been finding myself recently feeling hugely self-conscious about writing on the Weaning forum cos i know you're going to pop up and take the piss. not in a horrible way, i know (or at least i think i do... )
Anyway i don't know if that's the effect that you were wanting to have but that is the effect that it's having. maybe i'm tired, dd has been sick with gastroenteritis all week and maybe it's really the shit and the vomit that's getting me down, but anyway i just wanted to bring that to your attention. as i say, maybe i'm just knackered...