Many posts in this thread and elsewhere infer that crews’ lack flying skills, yet none of the accident reports substantiate this. Even the researches have mixed results when looking at skill degradation with autopilot use.
There is no indication from everyday flights that handling skills for normal operations are less than required; however non-normal indicators suggest otherwise. Thus the safety focus should be on how non-normal situations are encountered, - handling skill or awareness. Many LoC accidents were self-inflicted, the unsafe flight condition was created by the crew – they stalled the aircraft, and having done so by ‘conscious’ action might be less amiable to reconsider the situation and changing the course of action. These are mental skills not manual skills.
Thus the need is to improve appropriate awareness in these unusual and rare situations, the skills of assessment, and reconsidering and changing actions.
More manual flying in benign conditions is unlikely to improve skills for LoC recovery. Some manual flight might improve skills of awareness, but not necessarily be effective in self-created surprising conditions.
There is no easy solution; greater background experience and skills in non-normal situations could help, but never guarantee that every situation will be covered nor that the crew will call upon the skills.
Protecting crews from these situations in general has been successful, except of course when the protections are degraded, yet again not every situation can be foreseen.
Instead of chasing the negative aspects of this accident, seek to understand how those crews who avoided or recovered from the same situations; then do more of what they did.
AF447, the protections degraded; improve the protections ... action in hand.