The only difference in that I can see as far as my firm's concerned is that, due to the haste at which they have had to get as many people to qualify for 'Grandfather rights', there is now a !!!!! load of people who are 'authorised' to certfy but many of whom couldn't even be trusted to service a lawn mower!
Thanks to the CAA the standards get lowered further as a response to the growing shortage of hands-on skilled engineers.
Next thing will be the JAR 147 approved training organisations with 'guaranteed pass' JAR 66 licenses . It'll be interesting to see how the current licence exam failure rate reduces once the CAA give away yet another one of their reponsibilities to the companies they supposedly regulate.