Hmm the sailing analogy is an interesting one, like Say Again I too spent much of my early years playing with boats.
I'm not sure however, that it does directly correlate. If you take the average 34ft cruiser-racer you'll have one owner and another 5 or 6 bods to help him or her race it (even when crusing there be the owner plus three or four people on the boat who don't own it) so for the vast majority of people sailing boats the cost is mostly kit - not cheap... doubt you'd get much change from 1K if you had all the singing and dancing foul weather gear, thermals and what not - and beer. Granted the the owner will be busy in the shower tearing up £50 notes but for the remainder the cost is not that massive. I recall a serious race boat I sailed which had an owner new to the sport who was told "look mate your job is to sit at the back, sign cheques and collect trophies so keep quiet and don't touch ANYTHING". Which must be a bit galling when you already shelled out well over £250K and will probably lay out another £100K before the year is out (this was the early 80s).
Another interesting comparision would be to examine the number of aircraft that actually fly on a given airfield - if you take the average marina about 80-90% of the boats never move from one month to the next. It is not uncommon for a boat to actually go anywhere only once or twice during it's ownership - the rest of time it's somewhere nice for Aunt Fanny to come to tea.
I suspect that for privately owned aircraft, utilisation rates are also pretty low of course not everybody can or wants to go flying all the time (I know weird eh...you know there are even some poor souls who don't even like flying).
I think that much of this comes from the reasons why people take up flying (or sailing). In the first place, there is an image thing it's cool to be a pilot (or flash to have a boat), then there is the challenge of learning new skills. And once these hurdles have been overcome then there is a void the reality of looking after an aircraft (or 3 o'clock in the morning on a channel crossing when it's raining horozontally and the wind is on the nose and you've got at least another 15 hours to go)
Unless of course you actually just enjoy the sensation of flight (or sailing) this type of thing will lead to discontent and eventually dropping the activity. I'm not sure how much of this is to do with the smartness of the clubhouse or aircraft - although who wouldn't prefer to fly a newer well turned out aircraft? More to the point of the thread would punters, in sufficient numbers, be willing to part with the additional ackers that such a club/school require? I'm not sure that they would.