TT that charge is probably levelled at me, so I shall answer.
I don't think anyone has mentioned intelligence. A pilot needs the manual skill and co-ordination to be able to fly a helicopter. There are some very intelligent people who are hopeless at that, and some thickos who are very good at that. Of course few are born with this innate skill, they have to be trained and again I don't think there is any correlation between intelligence and rate of learning or final skill level.
But in modern helicopters with complex systems and where the pilot primarily interacts with the helicopter via those systems, more than via stick, rudder and collective, a whole new skill set is required. Again there are some classicly thick people who seem to find "getting inside the head" of these systems quite easy, and some highly intelligent people who are hopelessly impractical and struggle to even understand how a light switch works. As a massive generalisation, perhaps those at the higher end of the intelligence spectrum might find this skill a bit easier, but intelligence is certainly not a suitable metric for determine this in advance.
As I have said before, the major problem seems to relate to the large amount of time and effort devoted to selecting, teaching and checking pilots based on manual flying skills, whereas relatively very little time and effort is devoted to selecting, teaching and checking pilots on this now predominant skill set of complex system comprehension.
I will admit that the relevance of this to this specific accident is questionable, but this thread has widened to take in the whole recent accident history and state of the N Sea / oil and gas helicopter industry. Those at the sharp end are aware of a number of recent "near miss" events where automation confusion was the primary factor, even though they are not in the public domain and so not advertised here.
For me, the bottom line is that I wouldn't want to be a passenger flown by a pilot who was not quite sure what will happen to the flight path when he moves the cyclic, collective or pedals. Fortunately the current selection, training and testing regime ensures that this is not the expected case.
But these days, I also wouldn't want to be a passenger flown by a pilot who was not quite sure what will happen to the flight path when he presses some buttons on the autopilot/FMS/EFIS system. And I mean under the whole flight envelope, without or with reasonably foreseeable partial failures.
He probably is pretty confident pressing buttons within a reasonably small envelope of what behaviour lurks in the software, but typically these days he doesn't have any idea about the whole gamut of available behaviour lurking within the software, and I find that scary!