Its not surprising. Its more to do with the nature of the training environment that they operate in and the fact that they are in class each day living and breathing flying. Consider these two scenarios:-
- you rock into your local PPL school down the road. Find your instructor (incidentally who has a few hundred more hours than you) is running late with another student so you sit around waiting for your lesson. In he rushes saying lets just race out to the aircraft and get stuck in. No brief and you bimble your way through wondering what the hell has just happened in the past hour. Your instructor rushes off to another student and leaves you to pay the bill at the front desk.
- conversely a good integrated school will have you briefing for an hour beforehand from an experienced instructor who may well be from an airline or military background. They have probably trained thousands of cadets. They will be briefing from a set of standardised notes that the school will have given you in advance and which you will have read previously. Therefore the brief serves to refresh your memory as to the flight detail you are about to undertake and for you to answer any questions you might have. Following the flight there is a detailed debrief. Notes are written on your progress and any follow up points are considered for future lessons.
Two quite contrasting approaches to training. In the integrated model you need to remember that they know from the PPL stage that you are destined to be a commercial pilot and so the training is focussed at this from the outset. At little sleepy flying club that is not the case.
There is plenty of time to develop command judgement to a "sufficient" level for a new F/O during courses like the MCC and type ratings. This will be reinforced during your line training. New F/O's such as myself are not expected to be running the ship. Sure your opinion will be sought from the skippers (good CRM) but at the end of the day they are in charge and not you. Every line flying day is like going to school. You soak up the knowledge from those around you and develop your skills for when you are ready to make the jump into the LHS.