Dudley: T-38 great aircraft, no doubt about it, for FJ training, aggressor, and various other things you need a go fast for. Relatively (compared to contemporary Century series and later designs) easy and inexpensive to operate and maintain, very good to great flying qualities. Do they ever run out of airframe life? variations on the J-85 are around to keep them engined, new radios and take it easy on poling them around and they could last forever.
FJ curricula around world were fairly similar in terms of hours with high 200s or so sylabus hours in FJ added to primary training as I recall. Reflys and warmups added to flying hours the student graduated with, typically in the 400s somewhere.
In that vein, in the civil world there are some spikes in the accident rate curve at 40-100 hours and again in the 250-400 hours if I recall properly and after that point things settle down. With people at the end of primary training any extra hours they can get that are even halfway efficiently utilized must make a world of difference in airmanship and "air sense"
Are you still laboring (labouring?) with the Link Miles built Hawk simulators? I could not believe how they were designed and then accepted with little control or quantitative testing in maintenance of flying charaacteristics.
When Hawk was turned into T-45 it was a classic cockpit, but plans were in the works even then for a glass cockpit, and it was kept in the program as a product improvement.