The quality of the hours matters in my estimation. Personally I'd rather have a guy with some sort of operational time ( ie...airline, military, freight...etc ) vs 1500 hours of "dual given"..... its just a different type of flying. As for trainable, because a given guy was able to get a mult ticket and instrument ratings in a 172 and a seminole ( just examples ) doesnt mean he can fly a 50-70 seat jet at 350TAS... its just different. MOST guys.. learn and adapt... some dont. Hell in my UPT class we had an army helo guy who had gotten a commission in the AF .. he had 1700 hours of helo time and was instrument rated.... and washed out.. ON FLYING skills.... you just never know.

an before somebody flames me about dual given hours... while you certainly learn alot in that environment its still different.. not better or worse...just different than flying the line so to speak