Engines,
All very valid points. The current AV8B deployment can only help the boat people to stay up to speed with all the skills that you talk about while JFH are too heavily tasked to be able to provide the training assets.
As to why the RN can't produce enough people - I wouldn't have thought there was a simple answer. I certainly don't believe the answer to be "it's those pesky Crabs doing the damnedest to undermine the FAA".
I'm not privy to the exact numbers, but I know when I last operated alongside the FAA in 2000 they weren't anywhere near 'fully manned' - when fully manned to them meant 8-pilot sqns or something like that. Reading about the Falklands, it sounds as if they relied heavily on numerous RAF exchange officers to make up their numbers even as far back as then (though happy to stand corrected by an old and bold SHar boy in the know). So the notion that they could suddenly pull a rabbit out of a hat and fully man two RAF-sized sqns was always plain baloney. Unfortunately it would appear that the senior RN chaps have repeatedly asserted that they could and their bluff has been well and truly called.
Add to that a bit of a retention problem because the silk-scarved ones had to move house once in their careers, swap roles to doing the Lord's work and move some mud, and get involved with some Ops where there wasn't a cocktail party and a port call to Sydney on the horizon... It's easy to see why there might be a problem.
The trouble is, as anyone familiar with the training machine well knows - once you've identified the problem and turned the training pipeline tap fully on, it takes 3-4+ years before you see the results. Maybe everything will be just fine in another couple of years...
Regards,
Single Seat, Single Engine, The Only Way To Fly