A few thoughts: The web based "training" tests I've been required to take seem to be a method for a "responsible person" to show that a box of their own has been ticked. For example, those required to obtain security clearances and airfield driving permits. They seem to revolve mainly around recognising new catch phrases and their abbreviations. They cannot improve an individual's common sense or awareness of their personal limitations. Unfortunately, there really is no substitute for the benefit of experience in aviation.
Those who haven't been through military flying selection, training and the military way of mentoring and supervising newly qualified pilots are often very quick to criticise those who have. Yet many civilian helicopter pilots have probably unknowingly seen the benefit of that same system. It was quite common in the past for experienced military trained pilots to instruct, less so more recently. I'm not personally in an instructional job (although I hold an FI rating) and in a previous life completed four instructional tours in the armed forces, three of them rotary wing. Having later become a civilian pilot (well over twenty years ago) and having been lucky enough to be directly taken on as a multi-role helicopter captain, including SAR, I was initially quite understandably closely mentored by other pilots in the job, all of them ex military, too. Since subsequently flying as a corporate captain (some 16 years now) I've flown with quite a number of copilots, some of them previously "hour building" instructors. Some have been very well qualified on paper, with newly gained ratings. With one or two exceptions, they have all been very keen to learn and most would probably have passed military selection based on flying aptitude alone. However, without suitable mentoring none would have been safe to be let loose as captains, some of them well out of their depth at 140kts VFR, let alone IFR.
However, main problem with the PPL system is that there is no mentoring post qualification.
Employers will take on newly qualified and inexperienced instructors simply because in the main that's all they'll get for the money on offer. There is no depth of experience to pass on in those circumstances.