Cap'n Biggles Sir,
Your excellent post about the need for the industry to give pilots the chance to hone their skills in everyday operations is very much to the point. When the automatics start doing something that is not as intended, we need not only better annunciation, but even more important, to have pilots who are sufficiently confident and well-practiced in their handling skills that they can immediately detect a departure from the intended flight path/configuration/speeds/altitudes/etc using the primary flight instruments, and then be able and confidently to handfly until the problem has been sorted.
From what I read, these days at a distance, current airline SOPs actively discourage the development and maintenance of these skills.