One thing comes to my mind regarding this conversation.
Why is the First Officer not the Captain? If decisions around takeoff and landing performance ( along with hundreds of others) were simply a matter of checking the data and seeing whether it said yes or no, then plenty of 19 year old bright young things would be employed to operate the airliners flying around the globe.
The reality is that the regulator and the company have determined that the aviation environment has too many variables for this to work. For safe operation there needs to be an experienced person in the flight deck with the authority to say yes or no regardless of what the computer says. To abdicate decision making to the onboard performance tool is to disregard that reality and the paying passengers and their relatives would rightly feel uncomfortable if they were aware of this happening.
As technology becomes faster, more accurate and more reliable, are we less inclined ( as Captains) to exercise our command authority based on experience? I think so. There are examples of it on this thread.
If we are less inclined now than thirty years ago, where does that leave us twenty years from now? There will be Captains who have witnessed extremely reliable technology their entire lives, there is every chance of increasing reluctance to over ride or even question it’s solutions.
I think we need to be aware of this tendency within ourselves and actively question the common sense element of our decision making and consider what the passengers, company, and regulators expect of us.