That could be useful. I'd still use my hands to plant plants - scooping out the gravel, inserting the plant roots and letting the gravel very gently rain into the depression, so that the plant doesn't get crushed or jammed. There certainly are times when a set of tongs could be useful in pulling stuff out.

I find a 20"/51 cm acrylic rod (a refugee from Chicago Science and Surplus) really handy just in polking around in a tank, lifting up Java moss, to see that everyone is there, healthy and accounted for. The plastic stick is pretty high-tech for me. ;)

What plants do you have? If they are fast growers and you have over 2 watts per gallon, you should see a difference pretty soon. As you know the duration of the light is pretty nearly as important as the intensity of the light, so 14 to even 16 hours/day is useful.

I heard/ read something a week or two back which was interesting. Someone suggested that sometimes our tanks don't do too good plant wise, because we under plant them and they doesn't have the numbers to combat algae or significant enough numbers to establish viable colonies.

I'm still pondering that one.