Why I hate lip-trills

My open dislike of lip-trills has been a source of discord for me.  You see, my current teacher often (always) begins my lesson with lip-trills - before anything else.  I know she is not alone on this.  I have been virtually unable to find any other singer who shares my dislike of lip trills.  In fact, because I couldn't give a good logical reason why they in theory would be bad, I thought that I just must be doing them wrong.  Here is what I felt: whenever I did lip trills, my voice afterward would feel immediately small, thin, whittled down.  I can already hear it from voice teachers around the world: "it's supposed to feel small!" "You shouldn't be trying to sing big/warm/fat" "healthy singing is narrow singing with the thin-edges of the vocal folds" etc.  I don't know how to articulate it, but trust me that based on my personal experience, sensation, and history of performing - this feeling was not good.  It wasn't bad enough to have my teacher thinking I sounded bad, just enough to have those around me complacently accept a sound that is half the size of my actual sound.
Here's the thing about my singing - the quality of my voice never offends people.  I am blessed(/cursed?) with a natural timbre that is generally pleasing to the ears, and as a result, even when I sing with crappy technique, people assume that's just how I sound, and that I'm a decent mediocre tenor.  It gets very tiresome to have people constantly telling you that your personal dissatisfaction with the way you are sounding on a given day is all in your head, or all because you are listening too much and the acoustic of the room is unflattering.  Anyhow, it has been very gratifying to me of late to have a had a few moments where I was singing in front of other people in a way that, in my own estimation, was very good.  First, I sang at an event where I sang "o nature" from Werther.  This is not a challenging aria at all, but still, I happened to feel in ideal voice, like my singing was happening in just the way I want.  Not only was the performance successful, but my husband, who was playing piano, commented very vehemently and earnestly on how good this was, and if I sang like that all the time, how ideal it would be.  Next, I learned a new aria - "Bannis la crainte" from Alceste - which was feeling really good.  One morning, after a very productive vocal discovery from the night before, I was singing it to great effect, producing sound and using my voice in the way I always want to.  My friend stopped her work to call down from upstairs "wow!  you sound extra amazing today!!"  Then in church on the first day of Spring, I sang Rachmaninov's "Spring Waters" while my mother-in-law was in the audience.  This is a piece which suits me well, and I felt like it had me singing at my best and most exciting.  My mommy-in-law, though she is not a professional musician herself, told me afterward how much I had grown up in the past year, and that now I seemed like a real "Opera star."  All of these instances were very gratifying because these strong visceral positive responses coincided with performances which I felt very specifically were instances of me singing successfully, the way I wish to be doing all the time.
What people fail to understand is that that "extra amazing thing" they heard me do is not some fluke - that's me singing!  That's how I sing!  That's how I want to be singing all the time!  That is why I feel frustrated when I am not achieving that, and people seem to think I am being ridiculous for disliking my singing.  Look, I know no one is at their best all the time - but sometimes I think people - even people who are among my biggest fans - aren't entirely aware of what I am capable of.
All this is to say, though my teacher may "approve" of my small singing post-lip-trills, I do believe if she actually heard what I am capable of, she would prefer the real thing!
Anyhow, this was a source of great frustration because it created an unhealthy cycle.  People in the professional world would want to hear me as a full-lyric.  My teacher would tell me Rodolfo, Alfredo, Romeo, were too big.  Then I would go into a lesson, she would lip-trill me down, and then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, my voice would sound, even to my ears, too small for Boheme.  Which is incredibly frustrating, because when I sang Rodolfo as a cover put on in a dress rehearsal, I felt great, and like my voice was perfectly well-suited to the role.
I became frustrated by this lip-trill business because I thought, why should a stupid little exercise be able to wreak such havoc on the way I want to sing?  Surely I'm a better singer than that, to succumb to one little exercise?  But I remembered, even as far back as undergrad, having this perception while doing a group warm-up before a performance of Songs for a New World that the lip-trills were making my voice feel thin and not-good - I even started just pretending to do them, to save my voice for the challenging sing that was Man 1.  (I'm not joking actually - if you are unfamiliar with SFANW, look up Steam Train, Flying Home, King of the World - that s#!t is high!)
Anyhow, I decided to do a little research to try to come up with a good justification of why I hate lip-trills.  And I found it!

My first search was to find why, scientifically, people advocated for lip-trills.  Here is what one commenter eloquently said:

"So what is it that the lip rolls, tongue trills, puffer fish and other exercises like them achieve? All these exercises can ge grouped under one heading... they occlude the vocal tract... that means they narrow the space that the air can get out... by doing this they slow down the the air flow. Why is this a good thing? Well when the air can't get out fast enough, it creates back pressure. 

Voice scientists believe that this back pressure is beneficial. Why? Because you have positive pressure coming up from your lungs pushing up against the folds and negative pressure coming backwards from an occluded space pushing down on the folds. These two pressures cancel each other out and hold the vocal folds in place nicely. You can liken this to training wheels on a bicycle." 

Now - I know this is just a random person's opinion, but it actually seems quite sound to me.  My teacher had had me do the Ingo Titze "straw exercise" as well, which also falls under the category of semi-occluded vocal tract exercises.  So - back-pressure.  I agree - this counterbalance to the outward flow of air is crucial.  In fact, it has been my biggest trial/discovery.  I like to think of it as "resistance."  I like to feel a healthy amount of resistance in the voice - this helps manage breath, and contributes to a healthy, beautiful, powerful sound.  How to get this resistance, though, is elusive.  I have figured out a number of personal tactics that I might describe further another time.  Anyhow - it occurred to me upon reading this - the back-pressure caused by an occluded vocal tract is artificial!  You don't get to occlude the tract when you're singing a vowel.  You can do it on voiced fricatives, or rolled "r"s.  But learning to support a sustained vowel with the proper resistance in the body is a great challenge, and occluded vocal tract exercises counteract this process by offering an artificial crutch.  He makes the analogy of training wheels - well, training wheels on a bike are meant to be placed so they don't quite touch the ground if the bike it balanced upright.  This means that as a child uses the bike, (s)he can, for moments, get used to the coordination of balance in motion because (s)he knows that the wheels will catch her.  If you attach training wheels so that all four wheels of the bike are firmly planted on the ground at once - well then they will never be assisting the child in making the great leap of faith to experiencing the unusual muscular coordination of balance.  I venture that a child training on such a crutch bike, will find, upon removal of the training wheels, that they are still unable to ride.  This is akin to my feeling about lip-trills.  They offer an alternative artificial source of resistance in the voice which does not provide a facsimile of how it feels to find resistance in the voice without that crutch, purely using the body.  My personal experience is that lip trills make me used to the feeling of letting loose, un-supported air lean against the lips, which provide the necessary back-pressure.  Then, when I go back to normal singing, I have trained my body not to expect to be finding it's own resistance from within - and as a result, my voice feels thin and under-supported.
Now, I will say - if you tell me "well that's your fault for singing un-supported behind the lip-trill," you are right.  But that begs the question of what the point of the whole thing is.  If you are meant to be creating the back-pressure on your own, separate from the lips, why have the lips closed?  Why not just sing?  It seems to me like you are making a situation in which it is appealing, if not necessary, to use poor technique behind an artificial crutch.
How do I find resistance?  Well, that will have to be my next topic!!