I can't remember if you have your IR or not, its very easy to get over loaded and thats without having another way of doing things floating around in your head. And 15 hours is not alot of time to reprogram your habits aquired over 500-1000+ hours of flying. I suspect single crew I would be overloaded these days quite easily and I am very current flying none autopilot IFR appoaches down to mins in crap wx with 140-160knt appoach speeds but multicrew.
The powering out of stalls is an utter bastard to get out of pilots once they start doing it. Even if you get them to repeat until they are doing it correctly its still stilted, as if they are pattering it to themselves while doing it as an exercise. When the !!!! hits the fan my gut feeling is they will still go for the power out. And its hairy as hell when they do it. The whole aircraft just wallows and doesn't do much for ages while despite thier best efforts of stopping the nose dropping it does anyway and it recovers.
And I take you point about the limited sample. I have flown with pilots outside the EU commercially that wouldn't have a hope of passing a JAR IR or for that matter a CPL test or type LST. Thier tech knowledge is poor both of the basics and the aircraft systems. Although to be fair this is becoming a bug bear of mine with JAR trained pilots as well now that they seem to be passing the exams by learning the exam banks.
No IR, but I've become a fairly current and regular IMCR user - glancing at my logbook, averaging around an hour by reference to instruments and an approach a month at the moment. So, starting to feel I know something about instrument flying, but not claiming to be the expert that some here clearly are; but yes I can certainly relate to it all starting to go pear-shaped when overloaded. I'm sure I'll do an IR eventually - under the glorious new EASA regulations I'll apparently need it to test fly anything over 2000kg, but that's an issue I'm avoiding for the time being.
I agree that people will revert to earliest or most practiced training, including for stall recoveries (I recall nearly killing myself this way in a Flash 2 alpha when I pushed in response to an incipient stall on go-around.... .... when I had at the time only single figure hours in flexwings, and was applying a 3-axis/light aeroplane response!) So, the question is "where is this poor training coming from".
I'd venture that the culprit may be a good friend of yours and mine: the trusty tapered wing PA28. It is one aeroplane that will allow you to power out of any stall with safety - but will lead to habits that might well kill you in, for example, a PA38 or T67.
And presumably that very safe aeroplane has led students and instructors with very limited breadth of experience to believe that this technique works universally, rather than just on a handful of very safe spamcans such as the Warrior and Arrow?
G