I was once told, many years ago, by the then Head of UK CAA Licencing, that the whole purpose of making the exams difficult is to reduce the number of qualified pilots in the system, if it was easy, he quoted, supply would be far greater than demand.......clearly there have been times of pilot shortage when he was wrong, however, it might still be true today!
On the flip side, I recently engaged in a conversation with an experienced airline pilot (35 years on the job) who was funding 2 of his children through pilot training and his attitude was "just teach them the answers they don't need to learn all this crap". I was horrified to be honest but perhaps an indication of modern attitudes and what we now call the 'entitled' generation.
Who knows, I am not clever enough to understand many modern attitudes to the acquisition of aviation knowledge coming from a generation who had to write the answers long hand...no multiple choice in those days, but I still remember today a large percentage of what I learned almost 40 years ago!
SJ.