My 2c comes from having worked in the neighbourhood that Buffalo plays in. Yes they fly old airplanes. But they're well maintained. For every flying aircraft that company has, they have upwards of five spares in Yellowknife, Hay River and Red Deer.
Their pilots - they make some boneheaded decisions - just like some pilots I flew with on aircraft that were the great-grandchildren of the DC-3/C46/etc. Hell, I've made some boneheaded moves. So have all of the posters here.
Now, in many cases Buffalo has the TV show to blame for some of their issues. There are some other companies of equal history who go on quietly through the night, hearing from the regulator on a regular basis but never sparking the ire that is shown to Buffalo. Put a TV camera in front of anyone with a director saying "lets do that again, but with more pizazz" and see what ends up coming out six months later.
I am of the opinion that this does have more to do with paperwork than anything. To give an example, an operator I was once in employ of was given a 30 day notice of suspension of our AOC. The reason: The TC inspector could not tell whether 08/07/2009 referred to the 8th of July or the 7th of August. Now, before we go on a tangent - the form had in the date field dd/mm/yyyy. When this was pointed out to said inspector, he turned around and stated his preference was to see something along the lines of "8 Jul 2009" because that removes ambiguity. The NOS remained in place until we changed our date format to HIS way. The rationale was that some of our pilots would have been expired on training. They were not. We demonstrated with the form they were not. But because of his personal preferences we were served notice.
That folks is the possible mentality Buffalo is playing with. Imagine spending 4 decades fighting that type of attitude. Would you play nice?