To the original poster: in my experience, hours don't mean much of anything.
I began flying as a teenager, and to date have flown in a reasonably wide variety of operations. I've flown a lot in some years, and very little in others, ranging from tens of hours to hundreds of hours...and some of those hours have been nearly without meaning as I monitored an autopilot fly over countless miles of ocean, and other hours have been intense learning experiences which left me tired and unable to climb out of the cockpit at the end of the day. Some of the more intense flying is easily worth 500 hours of the pointless flying, in terms of effort, experience, and quality...but each hour is only one hour in the logbook...and scarcely more than a few scratches of ink.
I couldn't care less about the hours, but I'm keenly interested in what each pilot can do...and that's all that really counts in the cockpit.