Rare situation - treat as per emergency?
Double Back and Nil further,
My intent is not to fan a disagreement, but your exchange prompts me to ponder whether or not it is valuable for a flight deck crew to treat (at least within the cockpit) any situation that they rarely experience as if it were an emergency. It seems to me that there is high value in elevating the attention to details for everyone involved if the task at hand is one that is not common and has the potential to go south in a hurry if not done properly.
I am not suggesting that every time a crew encounters a situation that they have not seen in the last six months that they declare an emergency to ATC and make cabin announcements that would overly worry their passengers. What I am finding re-assuring as one who is in the airplane design end of the business and whose flying experience is about half as a test engineer in the back and half as SLF is that the folks at the front end take their safety job seriously and do their best to earn my trust and their pay. This is particularly the case when conditions lead to a combination of events not typically encountered.
Another part of my thinking on this is that with real emergencies so few and far between these days it seems valuable to me to have crews practice for the eventual bad day by treating a few less than perfect days as if they had the potential to become real "remember when" stories for pub visits deep into the future.
My deepest respect for all aircrews who spend their time up front anticipating and preparing for the day when they may earn a career's worth of respect over the course of just a few minutes or hours.