Gaseous,
I don't know if Frank reads this, but I do know that most of what you talk about has been discussed, some of it since my incident. At the time I mentioned to Dick Sanford that I'd twice turned off the governor with my sleeve, the first time as a student on my first solo cross country.
At the time I didn't realise what had happened, only saw the light come on, and nearly panicked (My first instructor's response to questions about flying without the governor had been: "Don't worry, you don't need to; they never go wrong". Can you believe that?). Anyway, Dick asked me to send MORs concerning all three incidents to the CAA, mentioning it was at his request, which I did. Apparently there had been a lot of R22 governor related problems; he was concerned about it, but the CAA were saying nothing had ever been reported to them. My reports were afterwards summarised in Gasil. And when flying with Dick, he mentioned that there had been discussions in the helicopter instructing world about what to do - have a check list with a marker so you were less likely to miss something out, a more obvious light, more governor-off training? I understand that since then the R22 safety course has had more governor-off training; I had some, but obviously not enough.
But yes, there is definitely a problem here.