1) I'm not convinced that this is simply a question of more/better flying experience. I agree about insufficiently qualified second officers, but the belief that there is something fundamentally missing in airline/type-rating flying training to me ranks with me alongside the idea that fly-by-wire is somehow "less safe". For the one-in-a-million event which led to this, there are the one-in-a-hundred events where overbearing, arrogant captains ended up effectively flying airliners "solo" because they had no confidence in their first officers (ie. were unable to operate an airliner as a crew, as the aircraft had been designed to).
2) Even if it is, I don't know how people expect to change this. There is much less military flying now - should tax rates be put up by 2% to pay for increased defence expenditure? Should pilot qualifications be increased in cost by £10000 to provide a greater diversity of experience? Who is prepared to pay for this? And how could anyone measure whether the extra training provided suitable economic benefit? And what extra experience should be provided? How would you know that you had provided all the training that would be needed to convert an "unsurvivable" event into not only "survivable" but "recoverable"?
3)
The idea that thirty years ago we were in some kind of golden era where pilots were real pilots, men were real men and blahblahblah, is simply not borne out by the facts. The absolute rate of accidents has fallen and is falling - see the graphs on
this page - whilst the number of commercial flights has increased. The argument that "we need pilots with somehow 'better' experience" is not statistically supportable.
To my mind, the approach of identifying a threat, then providing training to deal with it - steered by regulators and airlines - is entirely appropriate. The process that is happening now will ensure that professional pilots worldwide will have a greater appreciation of this combination of threats - it provides the extra experience that people say is missing.