Well, stick welding tolerates wind, tig and mig don't at all. If you aren't smart enough to move your head out of the smoke when welding, i don't know what to say. I don't do a ton of copper, but I've done enough to be very interested in how an engineer somehow hurt himself doing it, especially so bad he can't work as an engineer anymore. From what I've seen, you can be a quadriplegic and still be an engineer, hell you can even be on a ventilator. I can't even fathom how that can happen.
If you are mig welding, it needs to be clean. That means zero rust or mill scale, zero paint and oil. You need to be in the flat position, inside a shop, with the proper gases and settings, which are hard for single phase machines to hit. Mig is designed for that, production settings with the ability to manhandle parts. Yes you can do out of position with it, if you are good enough to know how and are running dual shield, but no structural welds are ever done (correctly) with hard wire out of position.
Ventilated hoods start to make sense in some production settings where guys are doing very heavy welding all day, which are honestly being replaced by robots more and more. As a guy welding on random stuff, often in position, usually making repairs on painted and rusty stuff outside, you need to be stick welding, which will tolerate a fan no problem. This is why they still are stick welding on almost every construction site on earth, it excels at doing xray quality deposits in all but the worst conditions. Mig or tig simply cannot be used like that, you have to control the environment fully. It is very common practice for certain pipes that have tig welding as part of the procedure to literally build scaffolding all around a field weld, and then wrap it in tarps to make it the same as doing it inside. Pipeline even goes so far (on big jobs using mig robots) as lowering a small hutch around the joint, where you have a temperature controlled environment to work in, so no wind can blow the shielding gases away.