Denti
The first objective of an airline managed training program is the quality of the pilot and the airline will endeavor to do this on a cost effective basis. There are very few airlines that have been left with sufficient resources to operate such programs.
The first objective of an independent, commercial flight school must be profit. It will deliver a quality inversely proportional to its profit motive. In my experience it is always less than military or airline managed training and, in my opinion, that`s as true of basic flight training providers as it is of TRTOs.
I think the mistake you`re making is holding up a desperately small sample of pilots (LH and other direct airline managed ab-initio programs) and assuming that those standards are representative of other training schemes.
I think your other mistake is not recognizing that, regardless of the cadet scheme, technological, operational and systemic improvements are likely to be masking weak handling skills that need fixing.
By definition, MPL cannot deliver equivalent handling skills. How can it? The presumption would have to be that handling stops improving after a certain number of hours and that the additional hours of other licenses (or gained by experience) are unnecessary.