@FERetd, i wonder what stake a General Aviation organisation like AOPA has in professional airline training? Anyway, a real MPL program isn't cheap, quite the contrary it does cost a lot more than the traditional unsupervised 250h wonder boy school of questionable quality. Our program costs the applicant 60k€, the airline has to pay another 60 to 80k€ to cover the rest of the costs. And no, in the beginning i was very much against it myself, but the results do speak for themselves.
@Globalstream, indeed, there is a huge difference between a commercial school and an airline run program. However the MPL was not designed for commercial schools without a very close airline partnership. In my part of europe there is no independent MPL program for exactly that reason, as the requirements of airline partnership are so strong that only airline run programs can exist here. As i said, our MPLs do get their full MPL only after they finished their linetraining, only from that point on could they apply to other airlines, before that they are locked to the sponsoring airline. And of course airlines can afford to do an extremely thorough entry selection and only take the best suited applicants, we had around 1000 applicants per seat available on the program and could therefore be extremely picky.
There are more and more airline run training programs, not so much in the west of course as many airlines do have financial problems to begin with, however BA might be a point in case against that trend with their future pilot program which is nothing else but an airline run abinitio program, although the risk is squarely on the shoulder of the applicant. But considering that all middle east carriers have their own program, most asian carriers either run their program or will start with it in the near future, or have access to students from a state run program, the number of abinitio pilots in airliner seats is growing quite fast.
I was surprised myself when our experience based training showed a distinct lack of manual handling skills of many (but not all) traditionally trained pilots including quite a large number of our ex military guys. Apparently those skills erode very fast when pilots become lazy enough not to use them anymore on the line and rather let "george" do his thing. Our MPL students in general (yes, there are exceptions) were not worse off and in many cases better, however they are just starting their carreer and still enthusiastic about manual flight, as manual flight is actively encouraged in my company many of those MPL guys and gals used that to fly manually a lot and increase their handling skills.