Sounds like good advice. I will be painting mine when I decide it's time for a spruce up. At least with paint, you can add or remove welded brackets and return the area into the "as was" condition quite successfully. After powder coating, that's not really an option.
From past investigations it has been cheaper to powdercoat than buy the paint to do the same job start to finish. I must have been looking at the wrong stuff. Frame and brackets were $180 for metalic black and gloss clearcoat. Plain black and satin clear was the same price. It would have been cheaper for just black but I wanted depth in the gloss, so had it clear coated as well. If you can get etch primer, undercoat, top coat, clear and thinners to do a frame for less than that, let me know where...
I used a zinc-based primer (in a bug-bomb) and Hammerite Smooth as a top coat on the R90S frame, swingarm, brackets, headlight bucket, and battery box. I used a touch-up spraygun for the Hammerite. It's proven to be very durable over the last four years. The finish is somewhere between a satin and a gloss, which is exactly the effect I was looking for because I didn't want the frame to create a distraction from the bodywork. I also wanted the flexibility of being able to touch up the paintwork later if required. Cost wasn't an issue, instead it was about being able to to do it myself instead of just sending everything out to specialists. It would have been cheaper to get everything powdercoated from the start, because I had a few unsuccessful attempts at painting the frame before I got the finish and coverage I was looking for, but I enjoy the satisfaction of having done it myself. Call it Dutch stubborn-ness if you will, but I'd still do it the same way next time.
