Fathom on SEO Chat always has a perspective that's worth reading and thinking about. In a recent thread about "What SEO tools do you use daily?" he gave his opinion that SEO newbies shouldn't be using any tools at all. The practical example he gives is about expired domains. Using an in-house tool, he found "a great Russian non-government agency domain that had 39 Wikipedia links." Exlaining further that, according to many, "Wikipedia links while nofollow are a sign of great trust. As anyone doing research would trust Wikipedia references and commonly reference such sources with a dofollow citation." So, you'd think that domain was awesome and a good buy...

I thought that was a great practical example of his point of view. What do you think? Other members in this thread recommended some basic tools - rank trackers, backlink checkers, etc. Screaming Frog and a few other Mozilla add-ons were put forth as good newbie tools. Can someone be overly-reliant on tools? Should newbies learn SEO without tools until they've developed their intuition enough to use tools responsibly?