In recent airlines the 'recurrency training' was thought to be amazing. In fact it was not so relevant. Lots of dead stick landings and ditching after BA at LHR & Sully in JFK. Hardly consolidating or renewing missing basic skills. Yes, they were without automatics, but that was obvious. What they never introduced was a misbehaving autopilot. That is very different from a malfunctioning autopilot. That should be obvious; but a misbehaving one, with a "what's it doing now", & a "why's it doing that?" followed by disconnect and sort it out scenario. Never done, but very good value. More likely than a BA or a Sully.
There's training & there's ticking boxes to make then training dept' feel good.