The recency thing is really a non-sense sometimes and it really must be assessed on a casa by case scenario, which I'm afraid is usually not the case.
I know a guy who is a sharp and experienced TRI/TRE with over 10k hours, he had a medical stop for about 18 months and in the mean time he was made redundant by his company back then. He kept working as a freelancer in the SIM conducting LPCs but went quickly out of 12 months recency by the time he got his medical back. He struggled hard to find back a job on the line due to this lack of recency while he was sitting for hours and hours in the SIM every week both at the back and in the front supporting cadets skill tests, obviously 90% of those hours were dealing with abnormals and debriefings but - hey - he did not have a 30' min sector possibly flown in all CAVOK in the last 3/6/12 months so he would definitely have been difficult to retrain...