Daget, there are lots of post's slagging off people with A licenses or R/BMA's that BA use. I know people with A licenses that are damn good, hard working professional engineers that can't manage the memory test that licenses have become. This does not detract from the experience that they have accumulated over the years. Don't slag them off and tar them all with the same brush.
I watched a B.A. A & C B747-400 CRS holder go up to the flight deck on an Air New Zealand jumbo when he should have been on the Singers next door !!! So do I assume they are all thick? NO.
What Rob is getting at, is a lot of cover and very little experience is a dangerous combination and the way training is going, you and I will bump into more and more people like this as time goes on.
At the moment JAR66 has a requirement for 5 years experience, I can see the airlines chipping away at that as the number of EXPERIENCED LAME's declines.