Unfortunately for most of us, CASA is the gold standard for unfettered bureaucracy staffed by people who have little or no interest or coal face experience, and in particular no understanding of general aviation. Their back office departments are run by little empire builders whose pay scale is proportional to their staff numbers. It's a government department, so there's no urgency whatsoever, in fact the longer they take to do something the longer they have a job, even if they can't readily be sacked or made redundant. There seems to be a policy of why should a regulation be made simple to understand, when if it's difficult to interpret they'll think they've done their job properly. I have no idea how many useless people CASA have in their back office , but if they fired half of them no-one in the real world would know or care, and there would be no impact on safety.

I'd like to say there are CASA employees out in the field that I've have very positive dealings with, but then there are others who have been biased and turned a blind eye to blatant, systemic and proven criminal breaches of regulations, while others have been brutal in punishing simple or innocent breaches that only exist because of over-complicated regulation that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the world.

Too True -- Project Balus, largely run by Doug Roser, whom old hands will remember as a head of Australian CAA, before CASA.
Tootle pip!!

PS: Given the Trans Tasman Mutual Recognition Treaty, NZ is a really good option, particularly for commercial operations. The AOC Thorn Bird mentioned could have been achieved in NZ for around NZ$30,000 with a guaranteed time limit, they would have been up and running in Australia on a TTMRA AOC literally years ago.

Nominated as a problem as long ago as the mid-1980s in the "Lane" report, an inquiry by highly qualified persons, much like Forsyth, and accorded the same respect by the aviation bureaucracy.

Lane called it: "---- creating inadvertent criminals" .

Tootle pip!!