FFF
As you can probably tell, a lot of my arguments are more rhetorical than anything else. Personally I don't care about most of this; I know my rights and my legal limits and I am happy to fly right up to them.
I get a perverse enjoyment out of taking the p*ss out of regulations that allow a pilot to do one thing, while providing a training syllabus which doesn't allow the same pilot to actually do it.
I believe flight planning should be a purely technical exercise based on rules and knowledge, just like it is in commercial ops. A commercial pilot doesn't look at the sky one day and say "better to be on the ground wishing you were up there than the other way around", "a licence is a license to learn", "there are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots", etc etc etc etc and all the other cr*p they put up on the overhead projector in the CAA safety seminars, which the training industry and its sponsors use to walk away from responsibility for pilots who legally choose to exercise their privileges and come unstuck.
Call me cynical if you like
but I think it all rolls along fairly smoothly because only a very small percentage of fresh PPLs get anywhere near to exercising their privileges. The majority chuck in flying pretty fast, having stuck to CAVOK days before they did so. The rest mostly hang in there on a very low currency, again sensibly sticking to nice days.
If every new PPL had to go places seriously, the whole system would collapse (through CAS busts never mind anything else) and the inadequacy of the training would be exposed for all to see. But, with most punters doing very little actual flying, there is very little risk of that happening.
It makes me sad to see most people blow away about £8000 around their local airfield, banging some C152 down on the runway for 50-60 hours, only to chuck it in soon afterwards, and I can't help thinking that modernising the whole process would help keep more people in there. A lot of talent is being wasted, and an above average proportion of the wasted talent is among punters who DO have the funds to do something with flying and who could take the whole scene forward.
Still, we need to be grateful for small mercies because it is these transient passers-by that keep the whole GA scene financially afloat. The industry knows that, of course.