jtr, Your mum will protect me since I only said nice things about you to her;-)
My point is, we either have a) poor quality candidates or b) a flawed command process.
Occam's razor - either CX recruited badly for many many years starting from about 1992 or the command course/star chamber is flawed - the simplest, most likely answer is the latter. WHy do I say this....because it is hard to believe that the same people that recruited in 1990, 1991 etc then changed their standards in 1992, 1993 etc. Additionally and more importantly, was the very sudden increase form ZERO Cat Bs in 2001 to multiple today. When I started my command course it was expected that about 95-99% got through on their first go. I knew of only 2 guys who were the equivalent of Cat C and 7-9 Cat D equivalent guys. Those numbers bear no resemblance to today's statistics!
Like I said, I can't 'prove' either hypothesis is correct. What I do know is that NR was GMA in late 90s and DFO after that!