J.O., do you happen to know if the Flash Air and Gulf Air F/Os were indeed cadets. What happened there could have been a problem of no seniority or excessive deference to the captain in a non-western cultural setting as well.
Many European Airlines rely on cadets to fill their ranks and while your argument about experience seems valid the safety record seems to fail to back it up.
With the projected pilot demand, the estimated training capabilities and the relation of the number of "experience-getting" jobs vs. airline seats to be filled we will have a lot more cadet type pilots over the next decades. There is not nearly enough outback flying, pipeline patrol, glider towing, etc. being done to give even 1000hrs experience to every pilot required. (ICAOs proposed solution to get rid of single-pilot training alltogether with the MPL license can't be the right solution for this problem, though.)
(Maybe one big flaw in the "getting experience through working one's way up the ranks" theory is that flying with modern airline-type equipment gives you far better chances of learning from a mistake while living through it thanks to various protective systems.)
From an individual pilot's career perspective a pilot with 3000 hours, 2800 of which are in a Dash 8, CRJ, Fokker 70/100, A320, etc. will simply have better chances to land an airline job than someone with the same number of hours in (prop) Cessnas, etc.