Shiny -
You bring up a good point that has kinda stumped me for some time...guys that want a seat in a plane, but don't want to be pilots.
I mean you would think SOME of them would at least respect the ability to fly in the soup by themselves, or try to hand fly once in a while...
But it's the same thing over and over...wannabes...that neither want, nor aspire to have the experience, now clogging the system, pandering to chief pilots that want checklist and sops robots......so they are hiring on personality rather then skill...
So it's a rare thing to find peeps that just want to be 'good' at something...to raise the standard.....in any industry these days....where there seems to be backlash against those folks that desire to rise above....to stand out....
Personally I am tired of bitching about it....because I think social media has enabled and entitled this rising tide of mediocrity to have a voice that never did before...and now they have power, they get together, they make excuses, they cover each other...
The answer I think is to simply fly where you are needed rather then fight the system and try to wade through a battalion of slackers that neither care, respect, or desire to step up and try to change it from the inside.
I've pondered that the answer might reside in making planes that actually go fast again...where they are tougher to fly, where they are more dangerous...rather then continue to build sub mach docile aircraft that fly themselves. Seems we should all be flying something like the Concord now...and if that was the case, you wouldn't be putting kids in the cockpits flying Mach 3 at 60000 feet.
So maybe the answer lies in not dumbing down the gear anymore.