If pilot A made it through the system and then crashed into a mountain, don’t you think there is a regulatory issue at play. Why would he crash into a mountain if he “made it through the system”?
No, I don't.
Wow, it appears you think just like the bean counters.
You seem to seriously believe that pilot skills are black and white. Competent and Incompetent. And if an aircraft crashes it's the regulators fault. You can't regulate all factors that contribute to air safety. At some point, skilled and experienced human beings are required to complete the safety system, and that's where it becomes subjective.
Do you think the same of surgeons? Black and white? Competent and Incompetent? Only assessable by a regulator?
Why would a surgeon stuff up an operation if he "made it through the system"? Yet they do!
So do pilots. Only you often don't read about it in the paper because the stuff up wasn't serious enough to bend any metal, or it was recovered in time - sometimes due to the intervention of another pilot or another party. But occasionally the holes in the cheese line up. It is up to us to minimise the number of holes and maximise the number of slices to prevent that from happening, and that isn't a black and white process.
As far as regulations go, the buck stops with someone. That would be the airline AOC holder, who has a mandate to ensure the safety of the operation - including assessing the experience and competence of the pilots. Last time I looked, the AOC holder at my airline wasn't even a pilot. He delegates his responsibility to a team of office-dwelling pilots who work tirelessly improving this or that to maximise the safety of the operation (or, more likely, desperately trying to minimise the safety impact of cost cuts). But at the end of the day, when that aircraft just misses that mountain, all those people are comfortably tucked up in bed, while pilot B calmly takes over from pilot A and averts a disaster. I just hope there aren't two pilot A's on the flight deck tomorrow night.
Why do air accident investigation reports run to so many pages? Because the accident is never black and white. There is no such thing as safe and unsafe. There is only more safe and less safe.