P2k4 - I am quite happy to be considered patronising, and lets face it, when you have a brain the size of a planet its hard not to be. But I really don't care what you think of me, my aim is to get a message across by whatever means. By the way, if you've read much of this thread you would realise that whilst the EC225 is all singing and dancing, the L2 is not. And this accident was ....... Oh yes, an L2. So patronise that!
But on a briefly more serious note, your point has been covered before in this thread. Of course manual flying skill retention can be an issue, but in this case, unless you consider skills were degraded to the point they had forgotten what the collective did, its not the issue. Mixing automation with manual flying possibly is.