Bumbo
Thanks for your candor. I have always advocated against buying sim time prior to arriving for the second interview process, and I think your experience on your ride may have been avoided through better study of the profile, not more practice in an expensive simulator.
The point of a full motion/visual sim is that it gives you the sensations of flying the real thing. It is an accurate, but not perfect, copy of what you would normally experience. EVERYONE who arrives for a try at an S/O position is low time with no heavy experience. If you weren't, then you would be interviewing for the F/O position, and the "bar" would be set higher.
EVERYONE is expected to have a "learning curve". The simulator instructor is looking for an improvement gradient...the gradient that you had when you bought your sim time in Vancouver! What they really want to see is how trainable you are, and how you respond to instruction.
Look at it like riding a bicycle. In the beginning, just staying on is the objective, and a huge achievement when you get there. After that, it's just a slow grind and really hard to measure how well you're doing.
Cathay is not looking for B742 qualified pilots - just good hands and feet men who can make good decisions and respond to instruction.
I don't mean to be lecturing anyone, but I have been in the jet instruction business since before many of our new joiners were born, and conducted many of the screening sim rides we're talking about. I truly think that buying time is a waste of money and terrible squandering of your learning potential.