Beardy The beauty of the LAA system is it deals with common sense and inspections not just paperwork, and it is not confused with regulations required for PT operations. This makes a huge difference to getting airframes and engines 'In the air'. What has happened to the 'other' certification regimes is that paperwork has replaced hands on inspection expertise (there being a shortage of experienced tech staff worldwide). Of course inspections are much easier on the sort of machines the LAA are involved with, however the level of competence of the inspection regime also allows then to inspect and pass airframes and engines built from scratch.
Nowadays this includes all manner of metal and composite machines plus the old wood and fabric ones. Although a volunteer fuelled organisation many of the inspectors are CAA lic engineers and are 'led' by a capable HO staff who have considerable experience in the industry including design authority.
Common sense will tell us that the Vigilant fleet (most of which were flown to their current store) are not falling apart or indeed in bad shape. The problem is the operators of the aircraft did not have an 'in house' capability to inspect or remedy faults therefore were/are in the hands of a contractor to perform the normal engineering back up. When this system was considered suspect there was no real in house 'expertise' to really query who did what and why, and therefore the great pause was upon us. In fact there was some serious capability in the actual RAF under their own GSA and someone should have asked for help when needed as it was not going to come from 2FTS and the OC there at the time. In fact 2FTS should have flagged all this up before it became a serious issue as they had a proper repair bay at Syerston but it was not in use, and no one seemed to know why. (me thinks the contractor was not able to deliver the proper service for various reasons, but 2FTS failed to identify how this would affect the long term serviceability issues) In fact the problem would have started when Syerston was called 3 FTS but the new OC upon its change to 2FTS was more interested in getting the Gliding volunteer 'civilians' into uniform and had no idea about leadership or morale (or indeed the fantastic operation he was supposed to head).
All the above covered in prev posts since 2014.