Having participated in extra long courses of days gone by with a SOE book spending over a year to fill it out, a not so long course with PCT and an even shorter course with POC my point of view is as follows.
The long course was painful. I don't care about the internals of every single LRU fitted to the aircraft and I certainly don't remember. The SOE book catered for the area in which you filled it out. A SOE book filled out in line was useless in heavy and vice versa. Only looking back now having done PCT does it seem like a very poor option.
Medium length course and PCT provided the best teacher/student ratio covering the everything I feel I need to know in the right amount of depth, I actually felt quite confident certifying and working safely around the aircraft in various stages of maintenance.
Short course and POC, bare bones course touching on the high points only and the POC felt rushed through no fault of the provider, but the limited access to aircraft.
In my own opinion, industry/airlines have it in their own best interest to facilitate access to aircraft for a substantial amount of time to private training providers if they choose to not train their own staff. Not everyone is fortunate enough these days to a) be employed and b) get the best training offered to them through their employment. After all, these guys will probably be working on either Qantas or Virgin's aircraft one day, it'd be good if their training was as good as it could be given the fact that most people can't be in full time training for 3 months at a time.
Besides, there's no point blaming the player for playing the game, blame the body who sets the rules of the game if you've got a problem.