safetypee, thank you; - a refreshing and engaging interpretation of the state of modern aviation, and one with which I am not at all in disagreement.
To clarify, the urgency of "knowing one's aircraft" encompasses knowledge of high-altitude, swept-wing, high-speed, large-transport flight.
, "rarer and particularly surprising situations"
Clearly I and a number here come from cables-and-pulley aircraft and steam cockpits, retiring off high-automation aircraft, and many have incorporated what was known and accepted as "wisdom" then, into modern operations because it worked and kept us alive. I take from your comments that this no longer is wholly the case and that such circumstances are not necessarily undesireable. We might say it is nowhere near the change made in the sixties from piston-to-turbine, straight-wing to swept-wing flight!
In terms of the original thesis regarding autonomous commercial transportation at levels we currently have, I think human performance either in the cockpit or displaced to the ground, will remain a challenge, and not entirely due to the difficulty in writing the code for such systems.
Foreseeing situations and either training, or writing software and firmware for such eventualities will I believe, obtain approximately the same outcomes (in terms of occurrences), for reasons stated earlier.
At the moment, (and I am always prepared to change, given evidence), it seems to me that pilotless commercial flight is an equivalent to Mr. Turing's test, and if the machine can pass it, we will have achieved that goal!