Without going into the emotional rights and wrongs of war, sacrifice, etc the fundamental premise of Binsleepin original post was a flawed one. The idea that you can put a few hundred hours of low paid work in order to access a golden grail jet command is self-defeating. Your very attitude is the source of tremendous downward pressure on T&C which in effect it means that
A.- when you finally get that command it might not be worth having
B.- if there are any hiccups along the way (redundancy, base closure, new aircraft type introduced) you will find it impossible to jump back up even into a FO job as others also seek to jump the queue by doing your job for nothing.
Binsleepin laments that despite his experience he is at the back of the queue yet he promptly offers to jump such queue by working for nothing (or very little) thus perpetuating the problem.
To anyone familiar with our job it should be quite obvious that we are paid not for what we (drink cofee, bitch about the latest management decision...) do but for what we can do (avoid utter devastation, hundreds of destroyed lives, millions of pounds of losses) and for our ability to constantly put ourselves in a position where we can avoid a demostration of our finer abilities. Flying a A319 in perfect conditions is indeed not too hard. What is hard is maintaining the self discipline to continuosly consider the worst case scenario despite the fact that that scenario hardly ever materialises. What is hard is to constantly be prepared and not fall into the sort of complacency that WC beleives in. For his comments WC seems the sort of chap that turns up to work and flies the aircraft as if he was riding a bicycle. It works while nothing happens but fate is the hunter and lets all pray that a time never comes when he is caught with his pants down. To a large extent companies like Ezy and others are guilty of the same flawed assumptions. This an unfortunate consecuence of being run by beancounters, at least they have the excuse of their ignorance.
If WC's premise where true then no experienced pilot would ever fail a simulator assesment. Sadly this is not the case. We must not confuse luck and good fortune with the required skills to perform the job at hand.