HC
Be careful dragging the airline brethren into this as it has been universally acknowledged that if certain pilots had obtained more 'stick n rudder' 152 flying then maybe they might have been able to recognise the symptoms of a stall or cope with flying a missed approach and a lot more passengers would still be alive today.
Technology is great but significant resources have to be spent training with it.
Such resources are traditionally allocated by pilots who are left to guesstimate how much training is deemed adequate.
History of O&G incidents indicate that such guess work has been woefully wide of the mark - possibly a factor of the industry determining what the CAA 'rubber stamps' rather than the other way around?
But that is another story.
I agree with you that it is quality not quantity that attend but invariably it is decision-making which lets the pilot down.
The more exposure to all forms of aviation the more experience to base such decisions on. It is as simple as that. Although in this day and age there is a tendency to think one can short-cut the route.
Consider the reduction of experience in airline cockpits now more and more skippers are flying with pilots qualified to touch the gear and do the radio.
A deliberate decision to fill seats with a 'button pusher' rather than someone the captain can trust to be able to fly the machine without an auto-pilot.
Maybe off-topic but let us not pretend that the deliberate dilution of experience requirements is anything to do with improving safety.
It is difficult for bean-counters to account for the experience whose value is only publically-demonstrated to shareholders on very few occasions.
High-time pilots have their foibles but I have experienced arrogant and over-confident low-time pilots who would be of little use once the button-pressing options were exhausted.
Equally, I have flown with some excellent low-time pilots - and by low-time I mean <5000-hrs total of onshore commercial/utility or <10,000-hrs tracking a radial offshore ;-)