Shep, agreed, proficiency is a longhaul nightmare, but when you dust off the cobwebs, there are basic skills in there somewhere, and as rusty as they are, they would allow even the least proficient pilot in the company to follow a simple RA. To become rusty assumes you had some level of handling skills in the first place. That is where this all falls over, hiring people with no handling skills at all, (not their fault, it is purely dollar driven, this is clearly not the safest way to crew the aircraft). Proficiency can be maintained even within our very restrictive SOPS with regards to hand flying and switching things off, but imagine using these restrictive SOPs to try and obtain handling skills in the first place? Imagine the load on the captain to manage the aircraft while your offsider practices one of his/her very first raw data approaches in a 200 ton aircraft. I am fairly sure that is not what our customers think they are paying for.
Now amplify this, give the pilot a total of 80 hours total time, and put them in the RHS of a 320/321/330 like KA do, and wonder why they can't fly a visual approach, or in this case gather the confidence to disconnect and avoid an oncoming aircraft that posses a significant risk of collision. Nero fiddles while Rome burns. The tragedy is we will be all standing around a smoking hole, peering in, management will be asking "How the hell did this happen?" while the line pilots will all be saying "We told you so."
Asiana 777 was an industry wide wakeup call on proficiency in raw handling skills, but these skills can only get rusty if you have them in the first place. An even worse scenario, the inability to handle an RA, quite possibly came about from a TOTAL reliance on automatics for fear of the unknown, the unknown in this case is a fear of handling an aircraft without the automatics. The company will say "our hands are tied, training resources are stretched as it is." Industry speak for "We aren't going to spend another cent, training costs us way too much already."
Time for the CAD to sort it out don't you think? Follow the FAA's lead and regulate in the interest of safety, not in the interest of profits. Time to step up CAD. Management will only do it when it is cheaper to do it than not to do it, that way they will be remunerated for it. Unfortunately that will only come after an accident, when the 'think tank' is formed to investigate the hull loss. Then it will be bonuses all round once they come up with the solution as to why it happened without apportioning blame to the underlying reason that we all know already, continually lowering terms and conditions, and putting kids with zero experience in the control seat to save paying attractive terms to those pesky experienced pilots.
Sorry if i am shooting in the dark as you suggest Shep, but i am fairly confident that I am not the only line pilot thinking this way.