Mel Cat C
A very long detailed and subjective first post, being only a mear line captain who has to fly with the "product" of the pilot sausage machine I find the quality of young FO's to be mostly satisfactory whatever the route that they took to get to the right seat and the very few less talented ones have largley come from the integrated courses (the very best one was from a modular course and she was very good). To the best of my recolection the company had only one failure at the simulator stage and I cant remember the source of that student.
So as a line captain I can't slide a cigarette paper between the two groups as a whole on quality grounds but what I do see is one group that has £20-30,000 more debt to pay off.
So perhaps you will see why I think that the integrated route very much the Rolls-Royce way to go and that at the start of the career prehaps it is best to get to the destination in a Ford KA.