What Ive wanted to get across to a newbie was the feel and shape of how organics function. Personally I think my fave image in my head is the whole electron density thing. It takes time to understand why the density would change, but once you understand why the electron would be pulled over towards the oxygen, and pushed away from the copper then you can start making predictions.

If you wanted to talk about rules of thumb, I gave one about notation.

As for the quality of fluorine as a leaving group depends on the chemistry. Right now I'm having a hard time keeping it from leaving in the following side-reaction:

Ar-F + ROK -> Ar-OR + KF at 30C (Ar = an aryl group)

Again, depending on the chemistry, alkanes (hexane, heptane, etc) are good solvents. The like dissolves like rule, is only helpful if one knows the classes of solvents:

Non-polar solvents, with the following subclasses:
hydrocarbon
aromatic
highly fluorinated hydrocarbon
other halogenated hydrocarbon

Polar solvents, which is broken down in to protic and aprotic classes
Protic solvents being:
water
alcohols
thiols
primary and secondary amines
acids
protic heterocyclics

Aprotic solvents include:
nitriles
ternary amines
aldehydes and ketones
aprotic heterocylics

Then there are the Ionic solvents and Metallic solvents (a good example of a metallic solvent is mercury, another being the combination of liquid ammonia, Na+ and e-).

True, non-polar solvents tend to dissolve non-polar compounds and polar solvents dissolve polar compounds but things aren't that simple. BTW the use of hexane and acetonitrile for separations is an example of a non-polar (hexane) not being dissolved in an apolar solvent (acetonitrile).

So dude ... don't encourage the newbies into poor habits of thought.