Two points.
First, remember the SLEWC system at Neatishead stood for Dtandby Linesman Early Warning Control. It was a bodge job to fill the gap after Tripwire was replaced by Flexible Response and the idea of controlling everything from West Drayton was binned.
Second, the SFC comment is a red herring. The SFC had, just like Neatishead, a bureaucratic requirement to do a certain number of practice intercepts (PIs) using the simulator, regardless of how many live you had done, of which 50% had to be automated.
IIRC correctly you had to do 40 PIs a month, 20 sim. There were months I did a couple of hundred live Pis (WB/BW F-4s in up to 8 ships, but that’s another story), but still was ordered down on console to do my sim stats.
You’d sit at the consol3 hitting the buttons to watch the computerised instructions pop up and talk to the sim driver… about anything as it was a complete waste of time just to fill a piece of paper filed and shredded a couple of years later.