In my opinion, experience is not measured in years, but in knowledge and skills gained during those years. If a person does not actively improve their skills themselves with time, it's my feeling there will be a marginal decrease in risk.
As long as the inherent risk of the activity remains the same, the person with more skills should be safer. There will still be the unusual accident, but even these can be largely avoided with some care.
We are in agreement on the first point. On the second, the person with more skills is only safer if he remains calm and is cognizent of what other risks there are. For example, how does one reconcile the folks who look at a compass, get a reading, and say the compass is broken and ignore it?
Adults have difficulty updating a mental map once it is established, and will do this. Experience doesn't enter the picture. I've experienced this myself and eaten humble pie upon discovering that mental map I started out with was dead wrong. You can be the best compass navigator in the world and fall victim to this problem, if you are one of many forested ridges, and there's not good unique topography to help you triangulate.
So you also need to research and understand some things about your own psychology, if you're truly going to mitigate some of these things. One of them being that you can be wrong, and hopefully can understand and accept it before it leads to fatal mistakes. Hubris and complacency are just as bad as inexperience, sometimes.
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