Savoia - the rotorbursts were purely down to bad maintenance - the one I managed to get on to a small island in some Loch or other on the Fort William run hadn't been comp-washed for a couple of years. The other one over Manchester airport (Kilroe's) was also bad maintenance, but there was a lot else wrong with that aircraft as well - I believe Dollar charged over £30K to put everything right after the ambulance conversion that was done in Blackpool. You can imagine that I took an early interest in what engineers were doing (or not doing) to my machines!
Actually, the flares were helpful - you need to punch the first one off inside the first 1000 feet, then the second around 400 because they take time to deploy. They stopped using them on the Gazelles in the Army because they would occasionally fire off when you pushed the transmit button - Eurocopter electrics again!
I've taught hover autos from 50 - 100 feet (powerlines) in the 206*, and you do need a slight check back on the cyclic in those cases otherwise the beast will gain speed all by itself, when you really should be doing a vertical** - to this day, even at the top of the avoid curve, I would probably do a vertical rather than try to gain speed, flare, etc.
*Don't try this at home without proper supervision!
Especially not in anything that's not a 206 (big blades, robust construction). Naturally, the collective going down takes priority.
**In the same vein, if you try to take off vertically, but do nothing with the cyclic, you will find the machine gaining some airspeed high up by itself - you need a check back in that situation as well.
WRT your earlier comment, the driving portion of the disc has a lot to do, and it only really covers about a third of the swept area. It's easy to see why, if the blade RPM gets too low that it has more work to do with less ability. In point of fact, the driving area is really windmilling, because it is driving the tail rotor and other hangers on. The only parts that are truly in autorotation in the proper sense of the word (zero torque) are the neutral points between the driven, driving and stalled areas.
Phil