First, my apologies as I had not been monitoring this thread as routinely as I should have done ... otherwise it would have been brought to heel a bit quicker ..
Some comments -
(a) if one has a disagreement with the thrust of the conversation, by all means put your disagreement but, please, don't restate the point ad infinitum .. it gets terribly distracting and boring
(b) the rational person accepts that the automatics are here to stay for all the right reasons. There is no realistic view which suggests that we can (or should) reverse the trend.
(c) whether an individual pilot prefers stick and rudder or automatics largely is irrelevant to the discussion
(d) clearly, if an unrecoverable catastrophic event occurs, the pilot is along for the ride .. eg wing separation
(e) however, depending on the individual pilot's knowledge base, skill set and determination .. a varying range of significant failures can result in a variety of outcomes .. some more successful than others. While there are a few in the records, my favourite is UA 232. By rights none on board should have had any chance of survival .. yet Haynes and his crew pulled off a miracle .. albeit with some peripheral bits of good fortune to help out along the way. If the phugoid hadn't caught them out at the last moment, they may have pulled off the miracle of the century .. but the gremlins have to get a foot in the door.
(f) it should be a reasonable view that the typical competent pilot can address minor, but initially confusing or improbable, JB failures and reversions
(e) the question is, regardless of the presumed probability of an undesirable event outcome, do we want pilots who have no/little chance of rising to the occasion on the day (ie the button pushers) - in which case we should look to UAVs ... or folk who have sufficient training and exposure to have a reasonable chance of saving the day (ie those who use the buttons intelligently but retain a sufficient basic skill competence to operate) following intentional/unintentional use of the O-F-F button ?