alt Hacker NewsMaintenance crew are highly trained people that in strange situations can pause their work to figure out a fix and ask experts what to do.
Very different from how a pilot has to handle strange situations. Being ready for anything in an airborne plane without a pause button is so much harder, impossibly hard, and not every air authority tries as hard to reach the impossible.
Stand outside an engine test cell for a while and tell me that maintenance crews don't deal with emergencies. I'll bet they do so more often than pilots, we just don't hear about it because there are no passengers at risk. Nobody is going to make a 'Sully' like movie about the maintenance mechanic that spotted an issue with a part under test before it led to one or more catastrophic failures. They're more likely to make a lawyer the lead than the mechanic.
This is not just filling out reports and looking at stuff, they're in no way comparable to your local garage mechanic (and not to dump on them either: they too have to deal with out of the ordinary situations).
The responsibility issues are the same as with the pilots as well, they fuck up people die.