Only just found this thread again, still fascinating, particularly the entirely understandable attitude of those who trained after the Meteor era, and consider them, and the Canberra, to be death traps. And the stats produced by Schiller would tend to support that view; incredible even when taken in the 1952 context, when things did seem to be tentpegging with monotonous regularity.
But I'm sure that those of us lucky enough to train on, and subsequently fly both those types in squadron service, didn't think of it like that. There were an awful number of aeroplanes about in those days, and an awful lot of pilots being trained, so percentagewise, though still quite unacceptable by todays standards, it did not appear to us as horrifying as it does today.
I never instructed on the Meteor or Canberra, but have done the odd check out ride in the back of the 7 and right hand seat of a T4 Canberra. My QFIing was done on the Vamp T11, JP and Chipmunk, and of all of them I found the JP3 with a slow student, short runway, constant power/variable noise Viper, teaching roller landings, to be the most worrying.