Oh c'mon, it's fairly obvious to me that Area training is harder than Aerodrome / Approach training. (I speak having trained as TWR/APR but it looked fairly obvious by watching some of the Area runs of my fellow college mates, and their amount of bookwork, that they had the tougher job).
Who's side are you on?! As a TWR and APC trainee, then watching an Area sim run would of course look absolutely baffling to you - its not the skill set you were trained in! Had you been trained with the Area mindset from the moment you arrived at Hurn it would be a different matter.
Bookwork? Of course Area guys have it tougher? Thats because they have to learn pages and pages of verbatim text. Lord knows why, have NATS proves this helps through the career?
As already alluded TWR/APC are shorter. They have been cropped in recent years much more than the area courses. This does mean however they are far more intense, especially Approach, when you are doing more sim runs in a day than your area counterparts will do in a week!
It can all get even stranger when you arrive at a unit. You could walk into 3 different approach sectors and barely recognise it as the same job! Of course the same could be said for Area sectors. But the interpretation of "Approach Radar" ticket is becming broader and broader!