Dear oh dear! What a wonderfully confused thread. Let's get back to basics...
So we start with the maintenance philosophy of the airline, which is something that this MBA graduate actually knows a little about.
Your maintenance philosophy is actually a function of money. No, not maintenance cost, it's a function of your national taxation laws, depreciation provisions and finance and investment environment.
What that means is that if you decide that your best shareholder returns will come from turning your aircraft over every Five years, your maintenance philosophy will be very different from an airline that plans to keep its aircraft for Ten to Twenty years or more.
At one extreme you can simply follow Boeings minimum recommendations. That is called the "buy it and fly it" strategy.
At the other extreme, you can maintain the aircraft like a Rolls Royce, including applying all AD's and SB's and Mods, so that your Twenty year old aircraft is actually very close to factory new production standard. This is really nice when your tax authorities haven't the faintest idea of how to discriminate between a safety related expense - like applying an AD, and a capital expense like a Modification.
It's even nicer when you sell the fully depreciated and there fore almost valueless, but beautifully maintained aircraft with new engines, flaps and gear, to a related company for a song, and then that company sells it to Les Hong at Evergreen for a small fortune.
Qantas is somewhere in the middle of that continuum, and therefore it is therefore vital for them to pick an MRO with a similar philosophy, because if they don't, then the aircraft is going to be either under or over maintained. This is because the values of a maintenance organisation penetrate right to it's heart.
To put it another way; who the heck cares about a little corrosion when the aircraft will be sold to Africa in Four years time? On the other hand, if you contemplate that your unborn Grandchildren may fly on this thing, maybe you had better care...
And yes, you can do it by the manual and it will all be legal, because ultimately it comes down to millions of small and incremental value judgements by the guys doing the work.
..So maybe Singapore and other Asian MROs are not suitable for this reason. That's what I think I'm hearing.
As for CASA, does anyone understand what "regulatory capture" means?
...And on a final note, consider the fate of BP. Apparently they directed that the blowout preventer on the Macondo well was to be overhauled in China to save money. That decision may cost their shareholders their entire investment.