Generally airlines stopped hiring ex-military pilots as they tend to crash too often killing hundreds of people at a time.
Military pilots find it hard to change from "Achieve objective; fly hard and kill bad guys" to "Land passengers safely at all costs" mentality.
A huge oversimplification to say that US maker Boeing provides the freedom for pilots to fly. By the same token, you might well say that The US is the most over-regulated country on the planet, so why are pilots allowed to fly it with such freedom?
I think that in general, you are arguably better off when the pilots are connected to the flight surfaces via manual controls. Even if the power and hydraulics go out with enough strength you may move some control surfaces a little - perhaps enough to control a plane in level flight - maybe even land it.
But if FBW shits itself - you are TOAST.
And for every crash caused by pilots not being able to take the control of a plane, there's probably another crash averted by the computer.
The biggest problem of course is that flying a wide-bodied jet is 99.9999999% pure boredom followed by 0.0000000001% when you live or die because of a series of bad circumstances piling on top of each other.
If the hardware fails for any reason (pilots get wrong information) then they can't expect to live for long - especially if the computers are flying it. At least if sensors start failing, humans are flexible enough to know something is wrong, and work around it.
In general, I would prefer to be flying on a wide bodied jet that has the computer fly the entire flight, but with a pilot on board who is exceptionally good at looking at the computer non-stop to decide if it is working right. I expect that pilot to be so good, that he understands the point at which he needs to kick the auto-pilot into touch, and take control of the plane.
See my signature. It's standard, not put here for this post.