Come on, have you ever been to uni? Of those 4 years, most of it was spent having a good time, or if the person was unlucky - working in some kind of job to pay for the tuition and board. The work was mainly struggling not sleep through lectures amd maybe a few intensive weeks before exams. The 200hr guy also had to spend lots of time preparing for exams. I'm sure it takes a lot fo time to prepare for and pass all the PPL and ATPL exams.
Accountant - come on - the only time you ever face any challlenge is during month end (2 days), year end (1 week) and perhaps during an audit (also a week). The rest is just mundane tasks you can really master to perfection in a couple of days. So - for any given calendar year your accountant is really gaining experience for at the most 6 weeks.
I know of a few people who have set up and steered to success their own accounting firms, or have become chief accountants within less then a year of graduating. It all depends on the market.
Yes, I have a Bachelors. And I've done some work towards my masters. And I've been to seminary. And no, not MOST of it was spent having fun. And it definitely was not as much fun as learning to fly.
And I'd say it's easier to pass the CPL, ATPL, CFI, CFII, MEL, MEI, CMEI exams than it was to pass some of my high school exams, and not as easy as some of my University exams, so I'd put them somewhere on a par.
But going back to the point, it's not about the day-to-day experience being an accountant, a programmer, a manager, a pilot, or any other profession, but rather about how you handle the exceptions.
You can write thousands of lines of code as a programmer, but if you can't debug a system critical application at 3 in the morning while the entire factory is shut down and loosing hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute, then you don't have true experience.
You can pass all your pilot exams, and be more talented in the airplane than Patty Wagstaff, but if can't handle a simple autopilot problem - see the recent news - then you're not truly experienced.
Again, we don't pay pilots to fly the plane, we pay pilots to handle the exceptions.
There are always exceptions, but it's not possible to believe that every 2000 hour pilot is as qualified as every 20,000 hour pilot.