These days, Airmanship is not taught and "the good habit of writing down the profile checks" is not something that comes naturally to a lot of new pilots, especially if they have little time doing it themselves SP IFR.
Strong, detailed SOPs that cover the above points raised by you all are what is required, so that a totally inexperienced, junior crewmember can usefully and safely participate in keeping the pax alive. This I suspect will be a factor in this incident. Will it be fixed? Probably not. Will the Chief Pilot frown on his boys wanting to practice "out of the square" operations? Probably yes. So what hope have these crews got?
I contend that doing an practicing NPAs only in the sim is not frequent enough. They must be practiced regularly on the line as well (quite apart from the recency requirements) but then even the manufacturers frown on that!