When I was staff at prototype at New York in the early 90's I had the pleasure of meeting three Prospectove XO's and standing watch with them. They were all very bright and very laid back, they had all commanded aviation squadrons prior to the nuke training. They actually came through all of the training exercises pretty well and I had a lot of respect for them. One thing that scared me was the fact that once they went through engineering drills as a watchstander they all agreed that this was great fun and they wanted to do them a lot on their ship because everyone seemed to be so enthusiastic. Apparently we may have created some monstor's from a casualty drill practice standpoint but they sure did mean well because they saw value in us and our training.
I saw all three of them go on to command the carriers, GW, Truman and Roosevelt following XO tours on other carriers. One even commanded the Mount Whitney for a year. The quality of the training program at that time was really high and although they had a senior rank, there were no corners cut, even including cleaning the LO purifier. Even though we gave them the option of observing some one else do the practical factor.
I always thought that the selection process for those aviators must have been tough to get to that point, because they were all very talented and very intelligent. ii hope they are still applying all of the same criteria now because as I look back on it what was being done as far as selection and training really served the navy well during the 90's.