I thought that steep turns were one of the mandatory items for the LPC until I realised that the concept of pushing the nose up with the rudder in a high-bank situation was completely novel to many pilots trained in the past years. Yeah, why do anything other than a couple of well-memorised drills in the sim... Most of the training scenarios are so painfully predictable that after a couple of practice runs they are no longer good for anything other than rehearsing the callouts and sequence of procedures. Give the average pilot an engine failure right after V1 and chances are that they will do just fine. Give them the very same engine failure at 1000 feet AGL and watch all the beautiful choreography get thrown out of the window.
One very interesting publication on the topic of competence is the ICAO Manual of evidence-based training. And it actually suggests that the training process goes a long way beyond the sim. There's no shortage of ways to collect data on where the critical areas for most pilots are and address those in a targeted way instead of repeating the same "worst-case" scenarios over and over again. Very encouraging to see that more and more carriers are taking it seriously.