It wasn't a disparagement of the Colgan pilot group at all. I've flown with a lot of ex-Colganites here at CP, all good sticks, most of whom flew the Q400, and naturally we've traded notes on flying the airplane, the respective training programs, & our conclusions on 3407. When I say it was infamously bad, I mean it was inadequate to the demands of rapidly spooling up a large fleet of quirky aircraft in exactly the ways that you delineated and the NTSB noted, and I mean that this was pretty widely known before the Colgan accident. It was discussed on this board by Colganites, for starters. The NTSB report certainly paints a picture of a group of pilots that weren't given adequate training in their airplane. When you interview a large number of pilots and the majority can't give you the correct answer about when to use the Ref Speeds switch vs icing additive airspeeds, you can be reasonably sure that the training program is to blame, not that it's a bad batch of pilots.

I'm no stranger to inadequate training programs. Early on at CP it was laughably brief, and few of our instructors knew much about the airplane at the time. We were fortunate to have a good group of check airmen that got us spooled up quickly on IOE - which was also fairly brief at 25 hrs & ~10 segments. Fortunately the E175 is relatively idiot-proof; the Q400 is not. Eventually the FAA shut us down and made us redesign the program, it's much better today although it still pretty much makes the assumption that you have prior 121. Now the early inadequacy of our training program doesn't reflect poorly on our pilot group, it reflects poorly on early management that tried to spool up a Part 121 airline from scratch on the cheap. The same is true of Colgan under Pinnacle, trying to expand too quickly on the cheap. But that cheapness is the main reason they were awarded that flying in the first place. Accidents like Colgan were almost inevitable under the lowest-bidder outsourcing system combined with a lax FAA.