This whole nit-picking mouth-music tendancy has really only developed in the last 10 - 15 years or so IMHO. Pretty much coincident with the rapid market-share growth of Airbus, and LCC's.
Airbus philosophy is to engineer the pilot out of the system as much as possible - and to rigidly over regulate everything they could not take away.
The LCC's introduced a new type of pilot to the market - low time, rapidly promoted callow youths.
Both these phenomena have combined to create a new generation of pilots who know little about AIRMANSHIP and instead know everything about mouth music and nit picking nonsense. This is what THEY now regard as airmanship.
Most of them can rhyme off the FCOM, but can't fly their way out of a paper bag.
As for the Aussies....a law unto themselves. I first encountered their anality in the mid 80's on B732's, an aircraft built like a brick ****house and with the manoeuverability of a fighter. A simple joy to fly - and perhaps the last real 'pilots airplane'. Yet they still managed to make flying it into a depressingly tangled mess of BS procedures and verbal diahorrea.
Even still - a few of them could at least fly the beast back then.
Not much need for that particular skill nowadays so long as you can learn off your P's & Q's well.