I like the way you (for sake of argument of course) use a brain surgeon as the other example... I would have chosen a carpenter or something a little less prestigious
There's a lot of generalisation going on here though. It seems that the general consensus here is that hours equal experience. I beg to differ.
Number of landings and thereby number of approaches is where the experience comes in to play.
Also, Rananim, You say that for a bloke to be accepted into the big machinery, they have to have seen all this buissness has got to throw at them. What does flying an old piece of metal tubing and fabric, in god knows where with god knows type of SOP have in common with flying for a big commercial airline? The operational aspects are quite different and the ways of going about solving problems are light years away. Certainly, weather and natural laws of physics apply in both cases but the outcome is very different between the two types of operation.
By experience, I would like to referr to RELEVANT experience. That's why a decent operator will specify a requirement of so and so many hours of ME/IR. When Brittania was recruiting years ago, they factored SEP time by 0.1. That says something I think. It might not be fair to people trying to break into their first job, but they're just trying to sort out relevant experience from irrelevant. Do you get my point? Ofcourse, it's a humbling experience to fly SEP and live on dogsmess in the outback. But seriously, if this is what's required for someone to be able to have the right attitude towards flying, perhaps they shouldn't have started with it from the beginning.
This is not to say that I'm against building time towing gliders, flying parachutists and so on. It's made me a better pilot in regards to visual approaches and visualizing a the flightpath (actual and desired) and hand/eye coordination. But other than that it was mostly for the fun of it and knowing that it was taking me somewhere. It didn't teach me how to plan my descents with respect to wind, ATC requirements or aircraft weights and all the other stuff that goes into flying the bigger stuff. Perhaps I'm cutting corners here in my reasoning but I hope you understand what I'm trying to get at.
Regards/ LnS