Owain, the advice is certainly well-founded - one can very quickly sense someone who's playing with people and into the ignore-list they go! There's too much good stuff to be trifling or fixing those who offer up nonsense.
Brian, Chris;
The B-over-A prejudice most certainly exists. Seen it, heard it, then as now. It's not going to go away because, normal personal preferences aside, it is based upon politics and emotion and not on technical or design fact.
I've flown both A & B manufacturers, plus old Douglas and newer Lockheed products. They all do the job very nicely. Of course, stats-and-facts are anathema and an inconvenience to those who harbour personal attitudes towards one airplane or another. But the Boeing
Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents (1959 - 2012) speaks for itself because the numbers are available to anyone.
The key, as we who actually do (or did,
) this work know so well, is in deeply knowing one's airplane, not letting up the studying where one's employer leaves you at the end of your training, not believing one is smarter than the design engineers and test pilots when it comes to operations near, at and outside the envelope, and most important, suspending one's shiny ego in favour of curiosity and life-long learning, which means quiet confidence in one's ability combined with humility - rare these days of adherence to empty personal "branding" habits.
In this profession these are the behaviours that keep one alive in an airplane and out of the office and/or the newspapers. Without animosity, folks like the OP of this fine thread come and go - seen them dozens of times and they're all the same. They eventually fade, tiring of the game, while those who know their stuff carry on in spite of interlopers, to share their valuable knowledge and observations.
Most of the time for the better, one takes the catalyst for discussion where one finds it and what a discussion it remains!, despite our OP's and a couple of others' efforts to take the discussion away from those who have made the thread with their unique contributions while those who for whatever reason(s) pretend to know move on to whatever they're better at. It's the nice thing about "the free marketplace of ideas" and the facts of flight as we know them.