details behind the case of DLH changing from silent to reading out loud (is that so?).
Not having flown for lufthansa, but with a similar set of silent SOPs in another airline in germany, i heard, and believe it too, that the main reason was the same as for us, cost, not safety. It costs quite a lot to update each and every manual with your own SOP, airbus charges a very high amount for that kind of work, and especially with airbus apps like the flysmart-suite you have to buy the airbus service, there is no way around it. From what i heard LH had a standards department that developed their SOPs which employed around 120 persons, which could be let go by the switching to OEM procedures.
A lot of thought and much more qualified people than line pilots make airplanes and procedures to fly them.
Well, talk to the airbus test pilots and you come to the conclusion that mainly lawyers write their SOPs. And yes, they have to consider the worst possible trained pilot on the line as well, which means of course that their set of SOPs is aimed at the worst possible pilot on the line.
Now, each carrier has a slightly different operational culture and company philosophy, SOPs should represent those. Using SOPs that everyone, from the top down to the last cadet, thinks as stupid, makes them pretty bad as nobody really gives a rats ass how you follow them. Currently i follow the flight managements advice to simply fly every approach in every condition below FL200 as raw data, as it saves a ****load of nuisance calls.