I agree, and we've mentioned that clips are necessary in other threads.
H44 may not end up with professional sounding results... but I've found that being forced to try to work around the problems in a production to make it presentable builds its own skill set. I learned about room tone by forgetting to record some after shooting fast (half my scheduled day) in a working and open bowling alley... I had to cobble together room tone from in between lines of dialog and didn't end up putting together a long enough loop to avoid obvious repetition.
I had to have it because there was so much background noise form the tunes playing in the other part of the facility and the sound of the balls hitting the pins constantly (not to mention the pinball machines in the background)... I cut the dialog TIGHT, then filled in the rest with the loop. The edges of the dialog were hidden, but the resulting soundtrack seemed to pulse as it looped every 10 seconds or so.
I failed. I learned. The project is not fantastic, nor professional -- but the one after had solid room tone in every location we shot as has everything since -- because I was forced to work on a solution given really crappy source material.
On a different project, I has an ATR55 shotgun (cheap as tin foil)... great mic outdoors. I also had recently switched to CFLs (search my posts here from 2005ish) and was extolling the virtues of them... until I started trying to figure out what the horrible full spectrum buzzing was in my audio. I upgraded my audio gathering kit after that to account for having to attempt to scrub the line noise out of that footage (never did succeed in a way that I felt was even OK). Every project since has much better audio.
Since then, I've been working on getting consistent crew for the audio gathering portion of my shoots (it's been difficult as it's not a glorious, glamorous job like slinging a camera around... but as you and I both know, it'll make or break a production). The goal wasn't to find someone who already knew the job even, but to find someone that could learn the position and get more consistent sound to start out, moving towards better dialog capture.
I'm certain you're cringing in your (really comfy looking) seat, but this is the reality of productions of the no/low budget ilk (real word, not a typo
). Hopefully, the work we're doing with less than adequate gear and really difficult source material may even strengthen your toolkit as you work with us to try to overcome some of these problems that would be less likely to happen on a professional set with experienced on-set sound mixers and boom ops.