I'm the author of the article and the publisher of the magazine, and I heard about this thread only last night. I think a few things need to be put into perspective here.
Firstly, this story was a brief sidebar to a 2,000-word profile of the flying club in question. I wrote it because I was intrigued to discover that a pilot in this chap's position should have no interest in getting an instructor rating. We had quite a long chat, which I had to precis into two paragraphs of quotes.
There was no arrogance in this young man, and he is certainly not a "plonker". He had thought long and hard about what he was doing and had concluded that it wasn't in his interests to spend £5,000 on the instructor rating when he believed the hours he was doing were every bit as valuable, or more so, in the eyes of prospective employers. The fact that he flew an aircraft with a wobbly prop was not an excuse for chest-beating on his part, simply a statement of fact - the aircraft does count as a complex single.
It's difficult to convey demeanour in a brief sidebar, but when you take out the umms and aahs, and the diffidence and attempts at justification, you get the nub of the matter, which can be summed up in the headline 'Whither the flying instructor?' As a flying instructor myself I'm interested in what the future holds for the breed. This chap's final quote was: "The old hours-building route has been killed off by the JARs, and I really wonder where the flying instructors are going to come from in the future. Certainly, there is little incentive for young people like me to pay for the rating."
He is a modest and thoughtful pilot who has been subjected to some personal abuse for thinking these things out loud, which is unfair. If I have contributed to your misconceptions about him, then I apologise. (It was certainly not a misquote, deliberate or otherwise, or "sensational journalism.")