Let me throw one more ingredient into the melting pot here.
In the olden days when pilots did their basic training all the aircraft were aerobatic and spinnable and the instructors were almost exclusively war time and used to doing aeros etc.
Fast forward a few decades and spinning was eliminated from the PPL course and I believe it has minimal requirement in CPL training. At a CFIs conference I attended last year one member was berating the fact the instructors applying for jobs had only ever done a couple of spins in their entire careers.
What difference does this make to the airline product? There is no doubt in my mind that being trained in spinning and basic aeros etc create a much more robust pilot. (I speak as one who was civil trained). When spinning was in the PPL syllabus as an instructor if the student finished the spinning exercise thinking "whatever happens I am not going to let the a/c get into that situation" they had learned a good lesson.
I agree that training isn't everything but we have to face the fact that we seem to have a new generation of pilots now who seem unable to recognise an unusual attitude and/or recover from more than 30 degrees of bank and or an approaching stall.