Minuteman,
this is a bit off-thread, but this is my take on the situation.
A few years ago Virgin took on 10 A340s in fairly quick order. There weren't enough sufficiently qualified pilots around (that old story...!) to fully man the ultra-long-haul routes that need one or even two relief pilots as full-blown first officers, so they decided to recruit a number of second officers (or 'cruise pilots') with much less experience to occupy a seat during those interminable hours over Russia.
Of course, these guys had to do the full CAA ARB course on the aircraft, and needed extra sim and base training time in many cases. Once on the line, these chaps needed a training captain in the seat to get hands-on time below 10000ft, so it was extremely difficult to keep their recency up without extra base-training.
Now, these guys are all first officers, with a considerable number of hours, but a very low total of landings. This inevitably will cause some heart-searching when they come up for assessment for command.
Overall, the scheme worked at the time, but has saved us little if any cash, and is now causing what will be an emotionally-charged and intractable problem. I doubt we will repeat the experiment.
WWW: cheers, mate. I was beginning to feel I was banging my head against a brick wall!!