I agree totally. I think a major problem is that too many managers are just managers, not airline people. The days of people like Juan Trippe (Pan Am / 747) who could be considered 'airline' people, people who saw through simple cost and went boldly ahead with true aviation vision are sadly over. Never again will we see a development programme like Concorde, something that was fraught with financial risk and was never really a commercial success, but, by god, what a machine!
The people making the critical decisions these days are unfortunate products of the issues at the core of this whole thread - they (by and large) have not worked their way up form the shop floor, and have no understanding of the fundamental issues involved in aircraft engineering. They have no concept of the skills sets required to make a good aircraft engineers / designers, and I have a suspicion that, in many cases, they only occupy a management position for as short a time as possible as they progress up the ladder. From their point of view, long term intiatives are not a good game plan, as they are sometimes a bitter pill to swallow in terms of short term expenditure. Far better from their seat to save a few more quid now and hope that they have moved on by the time this sort of thing happens. 'Sorry, not my problem anymore!'...very new labour...
In terms of money spent, on training, apprenticeships and quality staff, less is most definitely less.
This is not only a problem in engineering, but rife throughout the whole scope of the industry. Many functions and jobs these days are farmed out to the lowest bidder, and surprise surprise, the levels of quality decrease. For example, aircraft cleanliness in my company these days is shocking, most departures I have to go around and pick up the rubbish left between seats and in galleys, frequently emptying toilet bins that have been forgotten. The people who clean the aircraft now are from a cleaning company that, by definition, has the contract because they put in the lowest bid. The thing that might surprise managers in ivory towers is that they were able to put in the lowest bid because they pay the lowest wages, and the poor sods who do the actual work have, understandably, very little interest in going the extra mile. Now, if these same people were employed by the parent company, had staff travel and some semblance of a pension scheme, they would have a vested interest in doing a good job and might show some willing and initiative, and, dare I say it, they may even care!