Humans are not nocturnal, period. Consider your visual equipment versus a nocturnal mammal's eyes. There is a portion of the population that never accommodates itself to night duty while the rest of the surrounding world runs a normal day schedule...
Everybody shifts schedules at varying rates, and that changes with age, as does sleep efficiency. It's cliche that old people often fall asleep but it's also cliche that they don't sleep as long or as well. Those may be related.
The more or less "accepted rate" for accommodation is an hour a day.
You can't have a "sleep bonus" to carry forward against lack of sleep and even out. All one can do is be well rested when entering a short night's sleep. One also never entirely recovers from a sleep deficit, although a couple of good nights sleep makes the issue moot.
An abrupt time shift engenders circadian losses for the vast majority of the population. One can feel fairly well if well rested at the start of shift that reverses the body clock, and in the wee hours of the morning be functioning mentally at level comparable with yourself at 2-3 alcoholic beverages. You wouldn't fly after a couple of belts, but we accept flight assignments in that condition through ignorance (or maschismo?).
The first night is rough because of all this. My experience is that I feel better the second night, but the circadian issues are still there affecting mentation. Try a challenging academic challenge on your second night... There's no escaping physiology for something like 99% of the population.
The industry, and people in general, get away with ignoring all this because we have more skill reserves more than is generally required to perform tasks. Until one finds that you need ALL your capabilities to survive, say one misinterprets the import of a saturated atmosphere and/or low ceilings and launches and flys into the cloud you can't see unaided, and suddenly it's black all around and the gauges are whirly-like or you descend in a desperate effort to reacquire VFR, or you forget the tower on your route, or you're so close to base you think you can beat the weather....
I suggest that the judgement lost at critical point due to the abrupt shift change a considerable part of the issue. To my mind that explains why it's all platforms and operations- it's human factors issue.