Well spoken Boing. In support of your argument, I would offer as evidence the airlines ‘over there’ that train politically-correct individuals up to command at little more than post-infancy stage. SOPs are an absolute necessity in these operations, an essential crutch if you will, and at first blush appear to be doing a most effective job.
But as we have all too often seen, when events transpire to place these pilots outside the four carefully-defined corners of the Good Book of Rules, something which Murphy will always do at one point or another, things tend to get very nasty indeed.