Originally Posted by ctd57
There isn't much different between someone with 500 hours and 1000 hours as a flight instructor. It was just more laps in the pattern and more maneuvers. You reach a plateau as a flight instructor after so many hours of doing it. The new experiences will come once they move on to say 121 or 135 ops.
From personal experience there's a big difference between the 500 hour and 1000 hour CFI. Typically CFI's start with ASEL stuff, then work up to CFII, and finally MEI. You probably plateau around 1000 hours dual given, assuming you have done signifiacnt CFII and MEI. I do agree that a CFI who works only in uncontrolled airspace isn't learning as much.
Brand-new CFIs are usually nervous enough to stay alert and not push their own envelope too much. Statistics have shown that 600 hour CFIs have a tendency to get complacent, and are thus more prone to accidents. The ones who scare themselves (and survive) are less accident prone by the time they reach 1000 hours. I have personally seen this function like clockwork in my subordinate CFI's, and we actually would do a safety seminar at the 500-600 hour point to try to reinforce this lesson before our people learned it the hard way...some of them still learned it the hard way.