Also remember that not all aircraft are as forgiving as trainers of today. Get some left seat in a Swift.
Learn to fly each plane correctly, you’ll be better over all for it. And you will have more fun & live longer.
I’ve never done any aerobatic, and I’ve only done spins in a 152 many years ago, so take this with a large grain of salt: IIRC from my experience in the 152, if you let it spin a few turns and then recover, you’ll be at a very nose-low attitude by the time you stop the rotation and break the stall. Much lower than what results from your normal stall practices. By the time you finish pulling out of that steep dive, your airspeed will already be well into the yellow arc. Adding any extra power during all this will definitely be a Very Bad Idea.
To echo what GusNSpot said, I did my initial spin training in a C152 and it was so forgiving that within a certain C of G range we couldn’t get ours to spin, it would just accelerate into a spiral dive. In that way it was a poor spin trainer because you’d have to invent some interesting ways of getting it to spin in the first place, such as power on and aggressive pro spin control inputs and so on, and the recovery would sometimes happen spontaneously. So you didn’t really get an idea of what spinning was all about and you learnt a number of bad habits. If you have more than an academic interest in such things it would be best to learn properly from a dedicated aerobatics school with decent aerobatic aircraft. Be mindful also that spins have killed people with much more experience than you or me. The boss I had when I was flying the Pitts for work was killed along with a passenger after falling into what what was probably an unintentional spin (there were eye witnesses to the accident but it is unclear exactly what happened, there had not been any history of spin recovery problems in that aircraft.) The best defence against spinning is to not get into one in the first place and the best defence against that is to have a thorough understanding of angle of attack and to be ever vigilant to never let it exceed the stalling angle unless you specifically intend it to do so.
There are better folks to instruct you than me on this forum, including professionals, so I’ll leave most of it to them, but I do have some comments:
Aside from the noted issues with adverse yaw and spins, your observation is correct. You don’t need much rudder in a C-172.
There are, however, other small airplanes than the C-172 (and close cousins) and some of them DO have more significant adverse yaw. If you never fly anything but a C-172 this may not matter much, but you might fly some of those other airplanes down the line. Having flown some of them myself, I will say I’m glad my early instructors insisted on proper use of rudder. It is MUCH harder to unlearn bad habits than to learn proper ones in the first place.
It’s not to personally annoy you. 
I think it’s mainly to ensure you will make a safe landing in the event of an engine failure. I started my initial training on an aircraft that just didn’t have flaps, so for me my initial lessons were a bit less complicated, but the instructor still insisted on short final.
I will say practice will make all of this easier. It will get to the point it’s second nature and you don’t have to consciously think through everything.
I will also mention that on the occasion I was forced down into a small field, essentially someone’s backyard, I had to perform a final from half the normal altitude in near zero visibility. Afterwards I found I had put in flaps (presumably correctly) without even remembering doing so. So, as tight as you think your finals are now, it’s entirely possible to be in an even tighter situation, at which point all that difficult practice will pay off handsomely when you emerge unhurt from your undamaged airplane and walk the 20 feet to the back door of the house and ask to borrow the phone.
Some of the stuff you’re learning may not be that important in the context of a normal landing but it could be become critical during an abnormal landing.
I’ll leave the technical details to the professional instuctors. My opinion is that it’s more important to know how to properly execute these maneuvers, and when to do them, than what, exactly, they are called. Frankly, although I’ve flown several airplanes without flaps where these maneuvers are routine on landing I can’t for the life of me remember which label applies to which.
As noted, these are more common in aircraft without flaps. However, there are circumstances where you may be landing your Cessna without use of flaps (flap malfunction for one, large crosswinds for another) and that’s really why you need to know them. Some other aircraft may combine use of flaps with slips on landings as well. While you yourself may not use the “slip tool” very often, it’s still one you should have in your pilot’s tool kit.
Hard to add much to the excellent advice given already …
Adverse yaw and turn coordination …
The sign of a real aviator is good rudder work. The sign of a beginner or a clod is poor rudder work. It’s 100% OK to be a beginner, as long as you aspire to be (and work to be) an aviator and not a clod.
As somebody wisely said above, anticipate the need for rudder with or slightly ahead of aileron.
General thought … Always move flight controls by applying pressure against the airflow, not by shoving them some distance, be that large or small. Think in terms of force, not distance. It’ll be second nature soon enough, and the pilots whose second nature is calibrated in pressure are much smoother than those whose second nature is calibrated in distance.
On the topic of landing on the centerline. …
A big airliner-sized runway is 150 ft wide. The center strip is 3 feet wide. A small general aviation runway is 75 feet wide & the center stripe is 1 foot wide.
Regardless of whether you’re landing a Cessna 150 or a 747, the center of the aircraft is within a foot or so of your inboard shoulder. Sitting in the left seat, if you aim your face to impact on the left edge of the stripe you’ll be fine in a big aircraft. In a trainer, aim your face at the center of the stripe regardless of stripe width.
There’s almost never a reason to touch down with your mains not straddling the stripe. And there’s never a reason to accept that just happening to you, rather than you making it happen. The attitude in this last sentence is what separates aviators from clods.
Believe it or not, in the big guys we bet beers on whether we can keep the nosewheels splitting the edge of the centerline all the way from touchdown to turn off. That’s going from 150-ish mph to 10-ish mph over a mile of distance without drifting more than 6" left or right. You can learn to do it in your Cessna if you bear down. Maybe not right away, but soon enough.
Touchdown … Somebody above alluded to looking partly out the side of the airplane towards the runway edge to judge height. That’s necessary in some taildraggers, but *not *a good habit to have in nosewheel airplanes.
As you get down towards flare height (say about 10-ish feet in a trainer), move your eyes from the point of impact up towards the far end of the runway. You can really see your sink rate versus altitude that way. If you stay focussed on your impact point, well you’re likely to flare late, if at all, and impact right there - aircraft carrier style.
Next time you make a takeoff, stop for a moment on the runway and really look at the far end. That relationship between your eyes and the runway is the sight picture of a perfect touchdown. Like an artist, really see; don’t just look. Absorb the way the runway edges seem to flare outwards as they pass into your peripheral vision. Absorb how much it does (or doesn’t) feel like the sides of the runway are hgher than your shoulders.
In a real touchdown you’ll be a few degrees nose high, which will lower the runway in the windscreen. But your perception of your eye height above the runway will be the same. As will your perception of the “feel” of the runway in your peripheral vision. Memorize that static picture & try to repeat it on touchdown. That will avoid both the full-stall-and-fall-3-feet or the damn-shoulda-flared-a-moment-ago goofs.
I have nothing to add except for this:
I believe the answers you seek lie within…
Less cryptically, if you are slow (read: near the stalling angle of attack), and you ham in a bunch of aileron (read: overshot your base to final turn), you are now very near a stall with two wings that have different angles of attack. What comes next?
You may hear pilots recommend making gusty crosswind landings on the upwind side if the runway’s on the wide side.
Well, there are times, such as in the flare, when you do need to be sensitive to “what the airplane wants to do” so you can *respond *by making it do what you want. Feel the air (yes, you can), don’t just bang the airplane around. That also means no death grip on the controls - fly with just a few fingertips so you can feel it, and if it takes more pressure than that, just adjust the trim.
I fixed that problem, don’t worry.
Great description of how to time the flare - some instructors say to look for the “fishbowl effect” in your peripheral vision.
Not disagreeing, just using your comments as jumping off points for more yakyak. …
True, you do hear that.
My response: In a crosswind, does an airplane rolling out with all wheels on the ground drift downwind or weathervane into the wind? My answer: It can do both or neither, with different types being more or less prone to one or the other. Landing on the upwind side & then weathervaning into the wind & running off the close upwind side of the runway would be really dumb.
IMO (& worth every cent you paid for it): The only reason to aim upwind of the centerline is if you think you can’t prevent a downwind drift during the flare & touchdown transition. Which could be a legitimate issue in crosswinds near the aircraft limits. But you should still be intending to touch down straddling the centerline; your upwind aim point is just a method to achieve your centerline goal.
Agreed that ham-fisting is not the solution, and sometimes you have to accept a poor touchdown point because of errors you made upstream which are now too big to correct too late. The ideal is to learn from that and not make the same early mistakes the next time. And to recognize when a poor touchdown point is so poor that going around is the smarter choice.
Flying can be described as the process of continuously correcting small errors early before they grow into big errors late. What comes with practice is the ability to recognize ever smaller errors ever earlier.
Early recognition & correction at first seems like it’d be more work than letting the errors go until they’re big enough to really matter. Not so. As an example, it’s a heck of a lot easier to fly a good approach & landing when the airspeed is held +/- 2 knots than when it’s held +/- 10 knots. The incremental work to do better on airspeed makes everything else much easier. Likewise the extra work to select the correct glidepath & aimpoint & hold it stable makes the airspeed control easier. And both of those make trim control easier. And …
As an occasional flight instructor in gliders late to this discussion, I’ll echo praise for the quality of the advice offered in this thread - little or nothing to quibble about.
It’s been noted (indeed, in the OP) that modern aircraft need little rudder for normal maneuvers. This is true for powered aircraft, but definitely not for gliders - coordinated turns with long wings require generous rudder use. Most glider instructors have numerous tales of the 12,000-hour power pilot who struggles to achieve even half the rudder a turn calls for.
I’m certainly not unbiased, but I feel that most power pilots can greatly benefit from some glider time. I had about 400 problem-free hours in power when I took my first glider ride, and it’s embarrassing to reflect on how little I knew about what the atmosphere is actually doing.
Glider time is without parallel to any pilot. IMO, so is tail dragger and instrument work. Willingness to learn is right up there too.
Great thread full of very good information.
G