I think the definition of experience is very simple: those who have have made mistakes, been scared, and have the balanced attitude to reflect on them, and decided not to repeat the mistake. More experiece means a greater 'bank of scares'. Some pilots have had the scare but are too arrogant to heed it, i.e. nothing learned.
A 10,000 hr pilot has had scares and made mistakes that a 2,000 hr pilot has not yet experienced. The same goes for me at 800 hrs when I think of the mistakes I made at 300 hrs.
To distill the problem: we could all have made a list of the pilots we knew that were most likely to perish. That generally came true. They were the ones that after the warning, didn't learn and repeated the mistake.
Experience is having made mistakes once and being frightened by them - it's not, as generally thought, just greater precision in your flying technique. You simply can't legislate for those that don't learn the lesson from the first warning.
But, the PPL syllabus is severly wanting as it doesn't address in any way that flying is about decision making, not the physical skill of controlling the machine. When to fly or not is the most basic of these. Plenty of met theory but nothing about how to read a weather chart and assess likely conditions for the return flight! The 5hrs wasted on instrument flying plus dozens of hours practising engine failures is far better spent skirting bad weather with an experinced instructor in order to at least attempt to get across the fact that poor decisions will kill you, and more importantly your passengers, ten times more frequently than any other cause. I realise that the flaw in this is that many instructors don't have enough hours to have had sufficient experience 'scares' either. This is not the snobbery of more hours means you're better than those with less - simply that you've made more mistakes, hopefully small ones, and survived them.
If the PPL syllabus is to attempt to equip the PPL with the skill to exit IMC then the experience of my night rating taught me that 15 hrs is pretty much the minimum, plus the constant need for at least 90 days currency.
Do the legislators really care? I think not, especially now they are in Brussells not Gatwick. A couple of dozen deaths doesn't really figure in the aviation bigger picture. The rotary community is alone in this - it has to find a way of influencing the mindset of the 'it'll never happen to me' types. If it doesn't, there will be constant rate of deaths that will not change.
There is only one opportunity to do this and that is before handing someone a shiny new license. After that, whoopee, they are a helicopter pilot! and invincible. I always thought the non-syllabus rule of thumb for FIs and FE's was 'would I let my family fly with this person?' I've seen many signed off that clearly didn't pass this test. The FE has the student for an hour and can't possibly assess this other than in respect of their physical skill. The key is FI's being ruthless about those with the wrong attitude. They know - they really do.