Socky, do you realise that in the U.K. pilot population, there will be some who would read your final paragraph and believe it. Expect the pilot shops to start stocking red underpants due to unptecedented demand.
Your idea of leading horses to water and trying to get them to drink: if the whole training industry were onside, a process is there to bring pilots up to date every two years, but ground stuff like that is not mandated here, (unlike the USA), only flying, and then there are loopholes for SEP (not microlight or ssea ratings) like tests in 737 replacing the need to meet an SEP instructor at all.
Sadly the regulators in Europe seem to work on an assumption that the whole training industry is onside, when clearly some trainers and pilots see a regulation as a challenge to find an interpretation that arguably provides a legal hole. So your example would get pilots wearing red underpants, but some would wear them on their heads, saying "the rules don't say where to wear them".
Whether ground revision is taken seriously in practice in the USA, I don't know, as when I have a bfr there, I normally have a long list of "want to know" stuff to drive it, so I don't know what happens "normally". Personally I would keep a list of latest changes up to date, so yesterday for example I flew with a pilot for the two yearly training flight. The first thing was let him read my list for two minutes whilst I found keys, docs, etc, then just went through it with him, and this resulted in 5 minutes on the new self declare medicals, understanding how he might use it. I also sell a checklist which includes loads of stuff pilots need to know or do or refer to. The appendices contain many of the bits and bobs pilots get confused about and I know how often things change by how many times I need to update.
Free List:
http://www.higherplane.co.uk/bfr-ground.pdf - the checklist is
http://www.higherplane.co.uk/checklist.html but not free
Irv Lee - (R/T & Flight Examiner)
Deconfusion & Preflight Aide-Memoire:
http://tinyurl.com/pilotpalUK GA Twittering not Tw@ering: @irvleeuk