A couple of things I'd like to say; from the average guy's perspective, instead of the vet's.
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Personally, I don't mind the "halfass passes" part. As an average pilot myself, I know how other average pilots feel about this.
Pilots like us are in between the 'total n00b' and the 'seasoned vet' stage - and like with many other things in the world, normal people like us know that the odds are we probably won't ever be able to become as good as some of those vets in the game, no matter how long we play, or how hard we try.
Therefore, we are fully sensitive about the dangers of committing to a fight, and since we don't have any fantasies of our own skill level we will often choose to play it safe.
Being average doesn't necessarily mean being inexperienced, and with a few passes we can easily sense if the guy we're attacking is a potentially dangerous prey or not.
Some vets will say that with an attitude like that, we won't ever become better in the game.
It may be true, but frankly, that's none of their business in the first place. Nobody interferes in how the vets fly their planes, so why should they interfere in how us average guys fly our planes? If somebody flying 'timid' is boring, then one can simply disengage, come at co-E or higher alt, and be the one on the offensive, instead of playing the 'halfass dodgeball'.
I mean, us halfasses weren't exactly the ones who forced the vets to fly (often) inferior grade planes at lower altitudes than us. We know what vets like - they love reversing situation in their low-flying, inferior planes. Shooting us down in their low-flying, inferior planes will makes them feel superior(which they probably are anyway). From the vet's perspective, us average guys of AH are supposed to be cannon fodder. We're supposed to go down like that. If AH was a Top-Gun movie, the vets think themselves as Tom Cruise in his F-14, and we average guys are supposed to be like the middle Eastern bad-guy pilots who get ass-wooped everytime. And when we refuse to oblige to that, then the vets start getting mad at us.
We're supposed to attack superior enemy pilots in a rash manner, engaging in a 1:1 duel, and then dumbfoundedly get reversed, and get shot down miserably. If we actually choose to fly in a way which ensures our own survival, and perhaps grant a certain chance of victory as well (flying with alt.. flying with friends.. etc etc..), then they start calling us names.
Hey, if you don't like us timid halfasses, then get a better plane and fly higher so we can't play timid like that.
As I said, we aren't the ones who forced you guys to fly lower than us, in a mid-war plane. Sorry if we refuse to become one of your kills in a 10 kill sortie, but we aren't the extras in this movie.
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That being said,
...a true half-ass average would never do a lame HO like described in the latter part of Urchin's post. Like I said, we're average and skill-less, but that doesn't mean we're inexperienced. We weigh our chances of survival carefully and timidly, and we believe that if we can survive long enough, we can at least get a chance to gang-up on someone else and actually get a kill.
However, just doing lazy BnZ passes and then HOing someone at the first chance is simply being stupid, taking unnecessary risks. Therefore, the guys that Urchin met are dweebs, and they are not "true-blue" halfass averagers.
So in the future, please take care you vets notice the difference between us averagers and dweebs.
We may piss you off the same, but we're actually very different. 
