a tremendous amount of basic flying skills are no longer required to be taught.
It's worse than that. A tremendous amount is deemed either unneccessary or too expensive by the bean counters. Some operators insist the automation is used to get the absolute cheapest operation of the aircraft, and the bean counters do statistical analysis on the cost of training for some scenarios against the cost of the incident should it happen.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, and this incident is Airbus' Titanic, they have some serious soul searching to do in many areas.