Ah, but Bob V, you are from a community that has provided the wider RAF with some superb senior officers, a series of impossibly great Staishs, and one in which even an outsider can discern many of tomorrow's best and brightest Air Rank blokes - if they stay in, and barring unforseen tragedies of the sort that have already deprived us of at least one 'future Air Marshal'.
And looking at the last AOC-in-C of No.1 Group, it seems that the Harrier Force is still producing some absolutely stunning senior officers too, and I'm not excluding the Tornado force, either.
The day the Army opt to fill the General Staff with blokes from the Logistics Corps, the Catering Corps, the RMP, and REME, and when the Admiralty deliberately promote only those officers who haven't spent their careers messing about in boats is the day that the RAF should dispense with officers with experience of leading in the air within its wider management/leadership structure.
This whingeing and whining is poorly directed, in my view. The RAF has one of its better CAS's at the moment, and a solid AOC-in-C Strike. The problems come because they don't run the RAF - the politicians and civil servants do. All that they can do is implement the policies and try to minimise the damage!
There are some dreadful, self-serving, ineffective, careerist senior officers, of course, but I'm not sure that they're any more common in the GD(P) branch as they are in any other branch, though I speak purely as an interested observer, and not as a 'sufferer'.
And some might say that the ground branches - like the ranks of aviation and defence journos - are swelled by large numbers of blokes who weren't good enough to be aircrew!