Hi Lee, i agree with most you say, 141 is a killer and a waste of time.
But i do not fully agree with point 4 and 5.
4) Had to delay my checkride because the ops chief was unavailable and no one else would sign my IACRA. It pissed my designated examiner off.
--- This is mainly your instructors fault, he/she should have known that for a 141 checkride you need to have chief pilots signature in IACRA in order to graduate you. And the instructor should not have scheduled your checkride before that was done. The problem we had, and this was a HUGE problem, was that instructors would schedule a checkride way ahead of time and hoping to finish the students up. This ended up in cancelations and problems when it came to signatures. Also it was not that no one else wanted to sign the IACRA for you, it is an FAA requirement that only allowed Pierre in this case to sign it.
5) Impossible to finish the training in advertised time frame. One must double it.
----- This is just not true, i know of a lot of guys that did it in less than advertised. I know 3 guys that actually did the pro course in 4 months instead of advertised 7-9.