Rat_5, the simple reason for this process of ever tightening and prescriptive SOP is $$$. The view from the executive suite seems to be that flying has been "conquered", it is no longer the great mysterious frontier. In their worldview, automation has moved the smarts out of the liveware, and into the software. It is a process, it is a procedure, nothing more, nothing less. This has the bonus of allowing everything to be reduced to competency based checking and training. Even this minimum is under constant budget pressure. Pilots & training are viewed as just another component in the CASK to be brutally hacked away. Almost every operator is forced to do the same thing by competitive pressure.
The thing is, it is impossible to prove a negative, that is is impossible to prove training avoided an accident (the accident doesn't happen because the crew's training prevented it, but nobody knows the accident was avoided because it didn't happen). It is impossible for a training manager to go to the senior executives and say, "see we saved you $3 billion in adverse publicity & direct costs as a result of one accident our training prevented this year".
Accounts can only see direct costs, not costs avoided. Training must fall on the cost side of the balance, not the revenue/asset side. This is the fundamental conundrum we as pilots face each and every day at work.
The world is run by the accountants, and they have simply reduced almost all of human endeavors & existence to a simple cost/benefit analysis within the flawed context of being unable to account for the avoidance of negative outcomes.