Fly, navigate, communicate; in that order. Of course, the "fly" part is where it falls apart even before we get to navigating and communicating for the non-rated. It would tend to depend on how you got into the instrument conditions. Dark night off the California coast does not equate to a 180-degree turn and we're home free. The Pacific Coast, away from SF and LA, is dark on a moonless night. Sure, the weather might be VFR often, but that does not equate to VMC. And coming out of many of those places, you are most assuredly on your own as far as navigation too; radar coverage or an instrument approach may not be available. It's not a bad plan but the odds are NOT in someone's favor for actually carrying it out.
Your plan presupposes the airplane will be kept under control for that long. The studies vary (and the conditions of the studies are rightly criticized too), but they all point to "not good;" half of all GA weather-related accidents are due to this. In college, when I was learning how to fly, my Dad insisted that I get an instrument rating even if I did not want to do this professionally (at the time, I didn't). It probably saved my life a few times.
This is why, were I King for a day, we would not issue airplane private pilot privileges without instrument ratings unless those certificates bore the same limitation that commercial tickets sans instrument ratings have ("the carriage of passengers beyond 50NM from the origin airport, and at night, is prohibited" or something to that effect). Drastic and deeply unpopular with the Bay Area techbros, sure, but we break a lot of airplanes and bury a LOT of people due to LOC-I, VFR-into-IMC.
