I would argue that the deterioration in small arms proficiency (and therefore fear in of your small arms) actually comes less from an institutional disregard for the training, but from a more universal institutional deterioration of professionalism, discipline, and commitment.
Small arms instructors and the school used to take pride in ensuring people actually learned what they are supposed to know; that is, that people actually became more than just safe, but competent at weapons handling. Instruction lasted a whole day, but now, instructors at he range do everything as fast as possible to get you in and out of there, because the sooner you are done, the sooner they go home for the day. Before, you had to actually pass the qualification shoot in order to pass the qualification shoot. No, that wasn't a typo. No one fails the test anymore, no matter how bad they do. In fact, there was a short period recently where the range was missing the targets (the paper) needed to actually score a portion of the qualification shoot.