atpcliff, that's all well and good but he would've had his career hobbled because he didn't meet arbitrary minimum experience requirements not because he had a poor training record. How many good pilots would also have had their career stall if this was in place previously? It's no good putting rules like this in on the basis that it happens to prevent the odd bad pilot from getting through the system, you need to prevent them getting through the system by directly identifying that they are struggling and either providing support and further training or suggesting they might like to try a different line of work.
What's going to happen the next time an accident occurs and it was flown by pilots who had the minimum ATP and 1500 hours when they flew for their first airline? Is congress going to decide to up the hours to 2000?
Hours and experience are important and any particular pilot who has 1500 hours is probably better at flying than they were when they had 250 hours, BUT the Colgan captain made a fundamental error in stall recovery! It's not like anyone gets much experience at stall recovery while they're building their 1500 hours. I suspect that this Captain would've had the same incorrect response regardless of how many hours he had when he started. What was wrong was not his experience but his training.
Upping the minimum experience requirements is like mandating that no one is to drive red cars after a number of red cars crash. Completely misses the problem all together.