As a new student reL world I am wondering if GA pilots with modern avionics still bother with airway or navaid routing or if GPS Direct is becoming more popular for flight planning?

Do any of our PPLs here have any insight?

Thanks

You might get very different answers here, but FWIW I'm an EASA PPL-holder. 

Where I fly, the airway system coincides with the botttom of the CTA airspace, which is FL095. I very seldom fly at those altitudes, so I should not use the airway system on my flights.

While nothing stops me from using the same waypoints in my ATS-plan, I really should not truncuate the route with using an airway between start/end-waypoints.
Also, it is good practice to have a maximum of 30 mins between your waypoints in the flightplan. Flying an airway-system with a slow SEP cruise speed might not satisfy this "requirement".

For interest here are some of my latest filed flightplans IRL 

(FPL-XXXXX-VG
-P28A/L-SDGRY/C
-ESOW0730
-N0110A045 ARS280015 5952N01456E 5958N01410E
-ESST0120)

(FPL-XXXXX-VG
-P28A/L-SDGRY/C
-ESST0930
-N0110F055 ADKAT EBURI IBGAX
-ESOW0130

As you can see, it is a mixed bag of everything from RNAV-fixes, VOR-bearing-distance and LAT/LON.

I always plot my route on sectionals so it is easy to verify your position on the chart relative to an RNAV-fix.