I think the sight reader/spelling thing must be more complicated than it seems. I was definitely a sight reader when I learned to read (my mom has stories that reflect this) but I've always been an excellent speller. My DD also clearly learned by sight (although phonetic rules were singing backup) and is a fantastic speller, following very much in my footsteps. I don't know about DS; he doesn't write much yet. But he started as a phonetic reader, so it should be interesting to compare.
Yes! I agree that it must be more complicated. I'm pretty sure I started as a sight reader (as this crude split goes) because my mother taught me (to some extent, not sure how much) using flash cards, and she herself is dyslexic. I was assuming DS would be similar (although I decided against teaching him). In the event, he was fascinated by phonics from very early. An obvious strong interest in spelling came before an obvious strong interest in reading, and he used to (as many children do) put magnetic letters together in apparently random orders and require us to "Read that!" from very young. Yet, he and I started to read at very similar ages and his intellectual course and interests so far are very like mine. You do hear of children who over-rely on sight words hitting a wall in their reading, but it seems to me that many children can infer phonics even if they start with sight words, and that them doing this probably accounts for some of the complication (parents assuming their children don't know phonics because they haven't been taught them yet, but maybe often they do).
I suspect that a lot more of the complication comes from the fact that adult reading is a lot more complicated than often assumed. As fluent readers, we don't rely on either whole-word recognition or phonics - it can be shown with eye tracking and some lovely experiments based on it that we don't even see most of most words! - we do something much more interesting, involving a lot of use of semantics, i.e. we know what we expect to see. Prosaically, this is presumably why proof-reading requires a special state of mind, especially when proof-reading things you wrote yourself!
