Turned out to be an interesting thread this
MJ - I take your point about the extra hours in the aircraft and am probably going to end up going to Jerez for my modular flying training - they do the CPL test on a Seneca so adding to my multi time.
I feel that having the sim replicate the aircraft as closely as possible is the way to go - with so much of the IR (as I understand) being about cockpit management, having everything in the same place must be of value given only a limited amount of time to get familiar with the aircraft.