One could argue that flying an aircraft into the sea points to poor hand-flying skills rather than over-emphasis of this skill-set!
Point taken about the crew being the cause of most of the accidents, but what to do about that? When you look at some of the recent accidents it would seem the crew is often a bit lost when the automatics kick off. Yet, on the other hand, it's a lot easier to train and evaluate on the use of said automatics than on some rather indefinable ability to 'make the airplane do what you want it to.' So you are right about the way the trend is going, but what about the larger question of whether that is a Good Thing?
I think things will have to go a bit further before we may see a return to basics. I could be wrong about that, of course.
One thing I used to get a laugh out of was people calling me a 'bush pilot,' as if that was a bad thing.
I ended up in a simulator with the Instructor from Hell, a very keen young woman who wanted to strip off 15 years of what I had learnt as 'best practice,' in a Citation 500 Initial Course. We were not as one in our approach to this profession of ours, shall we say?
It was all frou-frou and how to check this or that system, rather than just keeping the damn' thing pointed in the right direction while handling a systems failure single-pilot. I pointed out that if I made it safely back to base then the engineers could check out the systems for me, but meanwhile I had a complex airplace to fly safely!
Then we had a period of about five minutes 'in transit' between emergencies. At the end of it She Who Must Be Obeyed turned to me and said, 'Okay, take the autopilot off now.'
'What autopilot?' came the answer. I guess she never saw anyone do five minutes straight and level before? One for the 'bush pilots' there! Try a bit of 'crop dusting' before you diss it, is my advice.