The wrong target !
The uniformed side of this debacle while not showing spectacular management skills should not be the target for most of the wrath from the forum.
The majority of the problems and the slow recovery rate of aircraft is largely a result of the legacy contractors lack of urgency, culture of indifference, lack of basic composite skills and a contract that lacks a performance criteria ( IE tech questions that go unanswered for months )
In the face of the lack of or wildly inaccurate data from the legacy maintenance & support contractors the uniformed side of this unfortunate mess have just stopped talking because anything they say is likely to be rendered untrue because they have been misinformed.
The MoD & VGS management are between a rock and a hard place, on one side is the very poor performance of the legacy contractor and the other to quickly return aircraft to service, the MoD may well have wished to have terminated the legacy contractors long ago but this action would have delayed the return to service further as it would take another contractor time to take over.
Part of the problem is that the culture inside the legacy contractors ranks is such that one would not want to employ anyone from that company for fear of poisoning the work ethic in your own company so the normal military contract practice of re-employing the workforce and a seamless change of management is not avalable.
There is no doubt that the underperformance of the contractors should have been picked up years back but with the budget of the RAF under pressure and other much more pressing business the line taken by the MoD was "it is only a simple glider contract, how can it go wrong ". An attitude that one can understand when you have much bigger fish to fry and not much money to do it.