My tour was at S3G in the late 80's and into the early 90's. For about one year we were the only protoype training in New York and the floatotypes were not built yet. It was crazy the number of students we pushed through in that last year of operation. I really liked living in upstate New York and I really liked the people that I worked with at the facility. There were a lot of long hours and that 15 day marathon of dayshift to afternoons was a killer. Time went fast though, and it helped me become a better operator and instructor later in the fleet. I would agree that it was hard to drop students then, and is probably even more difficult now (pump vs filter issue). To be fair though, we really only needed to drop an average of about 4 students per class back then. We had to nurse quite a few along, but that was par for the course in prototype training. That was when a class was 100 students ( ET,EM, MM) spread out across 4 sections. We would have up to three full classes in hull at a time to schedule watches and checkouts. Staff EWS quals were a problem then, they were hard to get people through the watches and suck up the extra load in each section during that time. We usually had 6 SPU's and 2 staff Sea returnees in each MM section to make the plant run, not a whole lot of slack to get through all of the other duties.
All in all I had a good tour , never went to the green table and trained a lot of good students. But, I did not go back to Prototype at the end of my Sea tour, I made the choice to get out because I had the feeling of "Been there, done that" and wanted to try something new. From my original section at prototype of the 8 MM's that were there, I know two of them did go back to New York to be instructors again. That is not a bad return of number of people who knew what to expect.
The most important thing for staff on a second prototype tour is to have the chance to do something other than on crew watch and instructor. They need a chance to work in classroom phase or off hull support roles to break up that intense training pace. That is my two cents worth on Prototype duty.