DP
llanfairpig, I bow to your vastly superior experience, but I do tend to think that it is easier for us student types to have boxes to tick at this point in our flying career. Your opinion that there should be less boxes to tick seems to be a valid one, but probably one to take up with the instructor community rather than confusing us poor students. At the early circuit stage of my training, if my instructor had told that one of the pre-landing steps was to open the door and jump out, I most likely would have complied 
I appreciate what you saying, obviously you must follow what your instructor says or more correctly the school or club policy.
This is a forum for debate and what I am suggesting is that you consider that there may be other alternatives to many of the things that you are doing now as a students and may like to consider for instance if you ever fly into Oshkosh or Silverstone when the British Grand Prix is on!. Anyone can blindly follow the instructions of another but progress in any aspect in life starts by questioning why we do certain things and could there be better way of doing something. If pilots were constrained to the thoughts of their original instructors we would all still be flying around in canvas bi planes with limited panels. (Mind you I quite like the sound of that)I use the definition of airmanship when trying to judge on what action to take.
Airmanship is to take the most effective and safest course of action in a given set of circumstances.
To my thinking when flying in an ATZ where there is more chance of meeting other student pilots who are also involved in encylopeadic checks the most effective and safest course of action is to dedicate as much time as possible on lookout, removing unnesecarry checks achieves this(I think). You may be able to recite the checks in groups or whatever but that will still distract your attention away from the radio. You may be able to check the gauges on the otherside of the cockpit and check the passengers harness and lookout and listen to the radio and build up a picture of the circuit traffiic and call downwind all at the same time but you see i am not that good, I cannot plus I am lazy I just want to sit back relax and concentrate on the traffic situation, listen to the radio, look out the window and call downwind.
When I fly in an ATZ I am frightened and its a good feeling I hope I will always retain. The experinece you bow to of mine(and please do not as your opinion is just as important as mine) includes having an Islander fly underneath me at Wellesbourne downwind with a student and carry on downwind and land and he never saw me once. Having a pilot fly underneath me when I with a student and was at 300 feet on finals at Bannf. Having an idiot in a twin join on the wrong base leg at Wellesbourne and nearly wipe us out.Having several near misses with joining aircarft in various circuits etc. I am also very aware of why some Cherokee 180s in this country have windows fitted in the roof.
But my major experince is sitting beside students trying to get to grips with getting a radio call in, notice I said trying to get a radio call in and then doing a litany of checks most of which are not neccesary. As a CFI when I wrote the SOPs my main concern was for the safety of students and not to encourage them to check whether the door was locked and they were strapped in downwind.
You may well be able to cope with doing all those checks and perhaps reciting a monologue too but you must remember that as a CFI I must write policy that can be safely carried out by everyone and I have had students from Richard Branson to students who could not even write their names. In PPL training you come across a very very wide range of abillity and a resposnsible CFI will always take that into consideration when standardisng or writing policy.