well jed,

as it was explained to me by several of the IOE checkairmen, the problem is in liability. When it has traditionally taken a candidate 25-30 hrs to complete IOE and be found "competent" in the airplane (especially during the over-abundant times of qualified pilots...aka, if you can't do it, someone else out there can) it doesn't look good, or feel comfortable to have a candidate take double, or triple the amount of time to complete the SAME training. When said "new guy" is constantly having the controls taken from him/her by the captain, or when the captain is incapacitated and this "new guy" puts the plane half a mile short of the runway, off the edge in the gusty crosswinds, or off the other end during the snowstorm, the feds are gonna come looking back to who was the last checkairman to fly with and sign this guy off as "good to go" for line flying, and congrats, you've got yourself a liability issue @ hand.