I've sat through some briefs on this before I left my last squadron, and what we were being told was what you guys are saying. The biggest take away was that the Air Wing/Tacair guys just don't understand what helo guys do, leadership-wise. So the recent push has been to make the Dept Head/OIC FITREPS more familiar to the TacAir guys. Things like requiring everyone to get either a MO or Ops bullet. One huge thing that HSL has to overcome is getting others to understand what we do, probably more so than HSCSSC, or whatever they're called now. Hopefully when the Romeo comes online, and HSL/M/NOP joins the airwing, that will help, and they'll see the capabilities of LAMPS, both operationally and leadership-wise.
It's funny, because this is a huge reason why I value my helo community experience more than what I perceive of TacAir. From my one-sided point of view, it just seems that helo guys work harder (again, leadership-wise, not saying operationally) as JOs and Dept Heads. That might not be a good thing sometimes, but you sure learn a lot as a leader, so the net result is good. At least IMO. Again, I'm only seeing one side of it.