While true, it's just rediculous the way that sounds. No credit, even partial, toward flight time while pilots all over the world are logging block time while sleeping in the back, performing bodily functions and chatting with passengers and cabin crew.
You could have stopped at "true."
A flight engineer is not a pilot. What pilots log is irrelevant; regulations cover that, and a pilot is entitled to log pilot time.
A 25,000 hour engineer who is not a pilot and who has not been engaging in pilot activities is not a pilot, period. Make that engineer a pilot, give him or her 400 hours as pilot, and you have a 400 hour pilot. Pure and simple.
A scrub nurse may have attended hundreds of surgeries. That doesn't make him or her a surgeon.
A legal clerk may have spent thousands of hours clerking, but that doesn't make him or her a trial lawyer.
When a certain 727 for a major airline was lined up for the wrong airport, it was the FE who pointed it out to the captain. Unfortunately for that FE, and many like him, that flight experience and a multitude of others like it, never happened.
Imagine that. A crew member doing his or her job. I know a flight medic with no FAA certification at all that prevented an air ambulance captain from flying them into the ground one night during a black hole approach. That didn't make him a pilot, either. It did mean he got to live to go do it again.
You make a great tragedy of the FE who isn't a pilot. If the FE wanted to be a pilot, he should have made the sacrifices necessary to have a piloting career. I did. Perhaps you did. Tens of thousands of others did.
When I hear someone say "I wish I could do what you do," my response is "you can." Nobody hands out aviation careers on a silver platter. They tend to be hard earned. I'm a flight engineer myself...one of many FAA certificates. However, one ought to walk before one runs, and if an engineer wants to log a few hours of pilot time and use that to springboard from the FE seat into a career as pilot, he or she really needs to sock up the experience necessary to qualify for the job...and that's more than a few hours tripping around the pattern at the local grass airstrip.