It needed to be done. Too many incidents. They should also be made to carry higher insurance for passengers.

Our concerns offshore are not actually the number of ditchings/crashes, but the ability to get out of the chopper if they do go down.
No one has been able to tell us where the four who died were sat in that last crash. People (myself included) have assumed they were all sat in the middle seats, which makes geting out much more complicated.
There's been talk of redesigning seats for more comfort...... I don't see how as people are shoe horned into those Pumas, there's no real room to rearrange them. They could take some out, but we all know that's never going to happen. It would cost too much money in extra choppers/flights needed to get people to/from offshore.
Offshore people prefer the S92's, but that's only because they're more confortable to sit in. It terms of getting out they're no better (in fact a tad worse) than the Pumas.
We had a large presentation two weeks ago on why the two EC225 Pumas ditched last year. Yes a crack caused the gear box lubrication to fail, but both only ditched because faulty sensors showed the emergency lubrication had failed when in fact it was still working. They also showed us what caused the failure and what steps hade been taken to prevent that particular failure from happening again.
Training is an issue we complain about. You've all seen on Blue Peter when we have to ditch in a mock up chopper in a swimming pool... Well the windows in there are larger than the real chopper windows, and they always sit you by a window in the simulation, never in a middle seat.

Those are designed to inspire confidence in the system. They might have discovered that the middle seats were exceptional difficult to get out of when ditching and so had a much higher death rate than those by windows.

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Which is why it's better to practice using those seats in a simulator rather than trying to get out of them for the first time in a real emergency.

Training is very useful. It might give the passengers lots more confidence that they can get out in time. Though will the rig operators pay for everyone to have adequate training in simulators every year?

I'm not talking about increasing the training frequecy/cost (currently every four years).
I'm just talking about sitting in the middle seat for at least one of the two simulations that submerge the helicopter.

Yes but unless you do more tests there will be ways out of it. Also will people say I am not rated to sit in the middle seats as a way to get out of being sat in them?

Nope. They don't get a say in where they sit. It's first come first served on flight.
Sometime they use the back seats to tie up any spare life jackets, and the last two people in get the seats by the door, but other than that anything goes.

Edit

I think I misunderstood there. I'm saying make everyone sit in the middle seat in the simulator once. It's no hassle, no extra cost etc etc. I'm not saying some don't and then use it as an excuse.