I rather think we need to be very careful in talking about 'deteriorating skills' because of increased automation. A cursuory examination of past accidents will show many, many examples of where piloting skills were lacking and these on unautomated aircraft where piloting skills were required. Automation has improved aircraft safety immeasurably. Several 'solutions' have been suggested on this thread but all run up against issues. Changing the technology is neither easy nor necessarily desirable. It must be realised that this is a human caused accident and removing the pilot would have probably been the only way to have avoided this accident. Remember the adage 'We keep on making things foolproof but God keeps on designing better fools'. I will state again - no matter how well you design a system someone will find a way to evade it and wreck it in a totally unexpected way. That is the reality of this accident.