I think instead of trying to decide with very limited information whether or not the CA is a wimp or a saftey master we should look at how this management at pinnacle is handeling the situation.

The normal procedure at Pinnacle when a pilot refuses an aircraft for any reason is to swap crews and hope they aren't able to talk to each other.
- I had a similar situation flying DTW-SBN with one engine gen inop and an APU that kept overheating and needing to be shut down in flight. The inbound flight was OMA-DTW and the crew had to divert TWICE after running the QRH and landing at the "nearest suitable airport". Then here we get to the plane and the logbook clearly says "ops check good". Nothing had been fixed therefore once again and we were "legal". What we didn't find out until the last minute is that the previous crew had refused to take this plane and we had been swapped into it at the last minute.
I was not comfortable taking this plane to SBN when the field was IFR and the threat of us being single gen in the soup when all they had to do was either fix the engine gen or fix the APU, but SBN is a mx base so they want us to "give it a shot". Unfortunately they young captain I was paired with did not think he was able to decline an airworthy aircraft (because he feared exactly what had happened in this case) and after long discussion we ended up going to SBN. The APU over temped halfway there and we ended up landing at the nearest suitable airport which to managements glee just happened to be SBN.

The point of all this is, this is how pinnacle operates. They have hundreds of crews flying each day and if they have a plane that other crews find "unsafe" they have plenty of other crews to swap into the segment and push someone into doing it. Thier company culture is to threaten us all with the idea that there is someone around the corner with a billy club ready to crack you if you step out of line. They are complete reactionary disciplinarians with not one bit of insight into projecting problems and creating solutions before the problems occur.

The thing you should all be worried about is not that there is a CA who is a wimp for not being a hand flying pro, but that there is at least one management group who is willing to sacrifice your ticket, your life and the lives of your pax to get thier fee for a departure.