but the ND has taken away the skill of orientation.
Interesting? I was brought up with needles & dials and a mathematical & scientific education. I played most sports. Perhaps all that gave me the ability to draw a picture in my mind of what the needles & dials were telling me. Equally I could navigate around London via the sun; knowing my start point, destination and having looked at a map before I left. I'd get myself into a small circle close to destination and ask questions.
Flying into Spain & some Greek islands B732 with nothing except a DME/NDB and a challenge not to spool up before 4nm kept the SA & orientation skills sharp. I could not believe it when I flew with a map & fix pages & distance to go etc. I found the amount of data made the job of mental SA so much easier; in 4 dimensions.
What I found in the sim and later on the line, sadly, is how little the F/O's looked at the ND. They were children of the magenta line with in LANV & VNAV. No mental x-check outside the PFD. It had to be a training thing first and a modern cultural thing afterwards. Laziness was allowed to develop uncorrected.
So I'm curious by your comment. It's not the ND that is at fault it is the way it is trained, or not. Raw data ILS being a classic case in point. I ask students, who came from a basic spam-can instrument panel, why they did not look at THE MAP? They had no answer even though they had a TomTom. It had not been stressed in introduction to the a/c. SOP's, checklists, QRH's and systems were the priority.
TRAINING is the root cause of so many modern faults.