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Gosh. I've been fly fishing for 45 years and now I find out on a chat board I have a bad habit. Must be so did just about everyone else in 80 or 100 years of fly fishing history. To this day, many highly skilled fly anglers advocate reeling with the most adept hand, handle to the outside of the body. In fact, every major fly reel maker well into the 90s designed and delivered fly reels right hand wind to suit the predominantly right handed, right-casting population. Anyone who taught fly fishing taught it that way. Any written material about how to set up a fly outfit, most common photos and illustrations all showed RHW for right handers. It wasn't an adaptive accident that a person learned to reel right because his first outfit was carelessly set up that way. The rarity of left hand wind reels from major makers--Hardy, Young, and so on--is because of the much smaller left handed-left casting population. It is this group that mostly adapted to reeling with the handle toward the body, as most simply used a RHW reel rather than get one of the rarer LHW. Today of course, people adapt to reeling left because they don't know how to baitcast or use that type of reel (cast right, reeled right) at all, and they learned to reel left with spinning gear. This they adapted to fly fishing, not knowing any different or bothering to find out. In the early years of this phenomonon, when reels were still factory delivered right hand wind, you would often see new fly anglers--some with quite expensive equipment, reeling left without (if the reel was convertible at all) having changed the line guard or the drag direction. But I guess they knew how to reel, (a few could also cast) even though they didn't know how a fly reel worked.
Well, it really doesn't make a heck of a difference which side you reel on, and some who understood the sport, as Gaddis and Vinnie describe above, made a choice about what would work best for them. I can reel with either hand, and cast, though not as well, left handed, so I've tried about every set up there is. Several others I know tried LHW as they observed the newer anglers reeling this way, and it's simple enough to do. Most concluded that RHW was better and still do it that way, including one who has taught fly casting for at least 30 years that I know of. The switching hands to play a fish thing, an imaginary advantage of LHW, isn't even a factor--I guess it seems difficult if someone hasn't done it--but it's automatic, not awkward, and in playing fish it's often advantageous to switch hands anyhow (including back to the right if the fish runs or sulks). So RHW isn't a bad habit at all, but some of the 90s newbies, who by now have learned to fish, prefer LHW, and that's really not a bad habit either.