Wise Words Chug.
The issues you raise in detail reflect what seems to be a common concern amongst those who went through that time. My annoyance is at two levels. Firstly and superficially, that of the importation in to the U.K. of American emotional hyperbole, where everybody killed is a "Hero" and seems to have been on nickname terms with so many correspondents; the majority of whom I suspect wouldn't pick them out if alongside in a bus queue.
Watching Blair deliver his fawning and blatantly insincere "People's Princess" monologue was to me the tipping point in that respect. That this mawkishness is now established in the civil population is bad enough, however it seems to have permeated the military as well and that I feel is a corrosion of our values.
These values seem to have been corroded in a different way within the Service , drawing me to my second point which I think is in parallel with yours. The organisational labyrinth now through which potential action must pass is almost self defeating. This again is an importation over the years from a culture outside of the military and reflects the generation of invented job and career creation activity of an increasingly non-productive society ( H&S, HR etc.) in which the tail ends up wagging the dog. Often the only eventual solution is by recourse to law, with another predictable circus being generated. That this is now the arena to which Flight Safety issues are having to be headed I find reprehensible.