The bickering you refer to does not take place on the shop floor. SH be it jungly or RAF is always can do.
The mid life update for Merlin mk3 is going to waste a lot of money. It will be spent on, amongst other things, a new cockpit to harmonise the fleet. Utterly unnecessary. It has the best cockpit of all SH assets at the moment and will still be the best after Puma 2 and Chinook mk4/5 because it is FMS based and not just a digital representation of what was analogue.
What it really needs are better engines, a meatier tail rotor and a new gearbox. The present mid life update is already very expensive and does not include the money needed to enable it to operate at sea for a limited time.