At no point has anyone here said pitch strongly just "enough"
And you don't have to tap into potential energy you just need to reduce your AofA which will reduce your rate of climb but it won't be required to decend. In fact recently this exercise was added into the UK syllabus as one of the set exercises.
As for not speed aware yes when they come online they are a bit !!!!e but we soon sort that out and usually its more wanting to shoot the approach at Vref + 30 or some such. As I said the only real time they can get anywhere near stalling is forgetting to power up on level off after decent. Aka the Dash crash in Colgan US. This crash is one of the reasons why the FAA is revisiting the FAA training on stalling. In the same way that the tail coming off the airbus has changed there views on controlling a flight upset. But the change is struggling to come through because there are so many folk out there keep going for this minimal height lose stuff and its very hard to teach old dogs tricks especially when they actaully believe that the new way is bollocks when it isn't.
As for the feel thing, as you well know there are pilots out there that have been flying for 40 years who appear to have relatively little feel for the aircraft what it is doing and little or no 5th sense about what the aircraft needs to sort itself out. Which is why I quite like your limit of nose to the horizon because its gives them something set to go for.