Vilas
As an airbus pilot you will understand you only get direct law with gear down and you don't do steep turns with gear down. Direct law is a short term state given to you as a flare mode of alternate law to help you keep a steady pull on the stick during flare and landing.
I have no intent to argue with your POV, but to clarify things up I have one question:
Are you saying, that direct law will not happen due to system degradation or any other FBW malfunction except with gear down and therefore flying in direct law with gear up has not to be trained, or is direct law in the sim only achievable by putting the gear down?
I think the point of the mentioned exercises by PJ2 is, that if you can do a 45° bank coordinated turn without crashing you can do turns with less bank as well and the execution uses less brain cells when trained to the extreme than when untrained and unexpected events arrise. And doing them in normal law with all gadgets working seems a bit easy in the bus regardless of bank angle.
Concerning alternate law being like normal law without orotections I like to remind that it comes with two different sublaws, one of them Alt2B with roll direct like in AF447, where Bonin had a hard time to cope with roll from the beginning.
"Lazy eights" like we military pilots had to practice would be a good exercise to expierience the different roll characteristics in Alt2b under a variety of speeds which come with the maneuver.
@alf507h
Theoretical knowledge is essential for handling skills, but never can replace actual handling. When germany was in the middle of the "Starfighter crisis", the MOD Steinhoff ordered more flying practice to increase the flying skills of the pilots, and while the flying hours went up the losses went down. It is not either improvement of theoretical knowledge or increase of manual flying skills, it is both.