Megan,
One does not have to be a Test Pilot to learn the handling qualities of an aircraft.....training plays a role in that as I recall.
Lawyers and Fort Rucker Flight Standards Mafia had more to do with that than did reality.
Remember the Army was big on standardization and thus had to write procedures based upon the lowest common denominator as does any large organization in its procedures manuals.
Short answer....doing a run on landing on a suitable surface at just above ETL using a shallow approach works for the minimum standard Pilot which is what the Army with thousands of aircraft and many thousands of minimum standard pilots flying the machines had to plan for.
I concur with Albatross that despite what was in the Huey Manual is not because of any great difficulty in the handling of the any of the Huey family less the C and M models which had the 540 Rotor system.
Same for the 206...same technique worked fine in it.
The "trick" was to not try to move the cyclic but rather just apply some pressure on it in the direction you wanted it to move and let the normal feedback actually move the cyclic for you.
Of course there is always the question of what do you do if there is not a place suitable for a 20 knot touchdown running landing....if the Flight Manual does not spell it out for you and you had not practiced it beforehand at some time in the past.
Running landings into muddy rice paddies would have been fairly interesting I would imagine.....or skiing across a heli-deck offshore.
My preference was to retain a slight bit of forward movement across the ground but only enough to assist in keeping the skids straight at touchdown and avoid hovering if possible.