In many years of training rotary guys and girls the AEOp guys seemed to struggle most when getting to grips with operating as a helicopter crewman. We often had to teach airmanship from very basic principles. We found that ALMs became proficient at their task much sooner.
It's possible that AEOps early training does not cover as much aircraft operation and airmanship as the ALM stream.
Having recently departed from the forces maybe the advent of streamless NCA may address this imbalance.