tarmac12 - I agree with your conclusion regarding the training captains, however not every captain is a training captain, but not going to start splitting hairs here either.
It is not an ideal way to gain experience, personally I can see that for people like my, with age against us, having a chance this way, albeit for me not optional, I could not leave my family for 2 years to go to Indonesia, others don't have this problem.
I believe he was doing his sim check approx 4 - 5 weeks after his TR skills test, and failed it. He told me after he thought the TR had been of a much lower level then was required by the airline. (Lion)
I believe he did another 4 hours in the sim, retraining, but was made to wait almost 6 months before I got to start flying. So the time line of 500 hours + 12 month contract, has to take into consideration various courses required and time spent for this.
He is happy now, he did his re-training in HK.