Sadly the holes in the Swiss cheese lined up for this guy. Weather, low time, the added pressure of having prescious passengers, equipment failure, perhaps unfamiliar with the immediate local area all stacked up on him.
As others have said those top of the line LSA's have one heck of a lot of advanced systems and controls over your average spam can ( retract, CSP , turbo). I wonder if differences training is sufficient to get entry level pilots up to speed on operating them , perhaps a endorsement like the type needed to fly complex or high performance aircraft with an approved syllabus may be better?