My opinions: I'm going to risk uttering 'Jehovah' and sat the Tucano was better than the JP as a trainer. The JP was good, and perfect if your front line aircraft were Hunters and Lightnings, but when I trained on it, it was well past it's sell by date. It was too stable, it was thirsty and had severe range limitations. We could go on about tandem vs side by side (I prefer tandem BTW), but the JP's one instrument panel between the seats was a massive limitation. Having your head turned away from the centre-line is a disorientation inducer. Tucano improved on most of these faults, it produced better pilots for the aircraft they would be subsequently flying. And as for inverted spinning, because it could! And it was possible to get into one inadvertently - as one of my students demonstrated to me one day! The handling was very good, but had enough idiosyncrasies to make good pilots. I blagged a few PC9 rides and couldn't see any real difference between it and the Tucano, except the rear seat view was vastly better in the Tucano.
As for elementary trainers, at that stage, it's the handling aspects which are the most important at this stage, as you are trying to instil to create a good basis for the subsequent training. In my opinion, everything that replaced the Chipmunk didn't do any better and often were far worse. The Bulldog wasn't better than the Chipmunk, the Firefly was worse than the Bulldog. Don't know much about the Tutor, but having instructed in G115s, I don't hold up much hope. I'm sure the Prefect would be fine if the students could stop blowing up the engines and the tall ones fit in it.