Mark Piercy said:

We had this told to us by a dealer here in France. They don't have the trained personnel to work on older stuff.. We were asked if we knew our way around the older models at our garage.

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What I've seen , since being told they "don't have anyone trained on 'older' models but the guy who knows about them, as a hobby, works on a Friday" , is that the older guys are mainly in the parts dept. these days. I have rarely seen anyone over 40 working on vehicles, and every vehicle has a computer of some type plugged in.
In comparison my indie has guys of all ages and they have mechanical as well as auto-electrics knowledge between them. They work on everything from Series I to brand new Range Rovers. Without them the Golden Girl would have been scrapped around 10yrs ago.
Land Rover is no longer a lifetime care brand. They know that for the last 20+ years they have been getting more and more complicated, more and more things have a failure date built in, and it's been getting harder to fix what they got wrong at the design stage. so they are washing their hands off at 3yr old.

Mark Piercy said:

Unless I didn't see you standing with us my mate while we were talking to a land-rover dealer.
Only two things in your paragraph you can vouch for as experience and the rest is possibly surmised unless you have other experience you can share

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A good friend of mine in the UK when I lived there ran a back street repair shop specialising in Volvo's. The local main dealer would send the older models to him and even some of the newer stuff when they couldn't fix the problem.

Mark Piercy said:

Unless I didn't see you standing with us my mate while we were talking to a land-rover dealer.
Only two things in your paragraph you can vouch for as experience and the rest is possibly surmised unless you have other experience you can share

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It would be helpful if yer pointed them out old chap.

I have been freelandering since 2004. Have a box file full of receipts. Mainly for parts I bought from them. They're not keen on me being in the workshop but will give you a quick look. I've had them test drive my old hippo may times so know the proocess they use for diagnostics. The heavily experienced staff do the finking. Others fall in behind to help. They still take on apprentices. Spent many a happy hour in service waiting while listerning to conversations. Since the gearbox replacement issues (all on ere) I buy parts only unless I'm stuck. Talk to them and they will admit how fings work. Parts dept know me by name. They kept the alliance discount going for many years after it stopped, in remorse or the issues. Put in tech requests on my behalf when we had parts issues or I'm stuck beyond what they can advise. When the techs pointed out the air con bearing had gone, they have to change the whole unit etc but I could do the bearing myself, it was from then on they weren't keen to take mine back in. I've witnessed others being tempted away. Usually by price. Leave yer hawkeye diagnostics and scope in the boot and they're just as keen to find out about you. I've used 5 other main dealers for different fings. All different sizes. I'm lucky to have a number of indy garages that specialise in lr products. I trust one but not the others. When they can't price up a v6 fl1 cam belt change there's a problem. Found out years later they would have subbed it to another garage as they dun't have the locking tools to do it. Sealy sell them. Usual up selling on what they can do. How they help LR etc. You would fink they're running the garage at Solihull on LR's factory site the way they talk. The one they didn't know of.

À main dealer at Angoulême here in France.
They had subbed out the paintwork on my son's P38 as well but took the insure price for it..
There may well be dedicated and committed dealers out there as you've experienced but it is quickly becoming a thing of the past in this modern age. Using your info it confirms there are those who can and still will deal with older models and using info from other bods experiences there unfortunately those who don't,

I found the above posts interesting & will add my own experience(s)

On the subject of subbing out; back in 2000 I met such a contractor who was attending to P38 4.6 V8's at a time when LR main stealers were still dealing with warranty claims, for what turned out to be a slipped liner, as a head gasket problem .. I kid you not, one such large establishment not far from me had a row of 4.6's lined up on the car park waiting their turn for workshop slots. How long they were practicing this futile task before realisation dawned I've no idea.
I think LR was still running around in circles back then trying to sus. the cause of the problem. I'd have loved to be a fly on the boardroom wall when some brave soul asked the question 'whose idea was it to bore the block' bearing in mind the trouble had started with the 3.9

When it comes to the JLR stuff an Indie close to me (now retired) found a way of changing the belts(?) at the back of the engine without lifting the body, he ended up with skinned knuckles but charged an appropriate labour rate for his suffering!