Well, what a marathon. I'm sure you'll get more respect shown to you after that civil and well-thought out post.
As I said, I agree totally that we, like just about everyone, is facing automation. It won't necessarily do it better, but if the bosses could shift the traffic at a cheaper price, they will. When my son is asked "what do you want to do when you grow up?", his answer is "not ATC". "Why?". "Because my dad says there wont be any in the future". Like everything else that is automated, it will be less flexible, more specialised and be a painful transition. Hopefully I'll be old enough to accept my redundancy with good grace.
A couple of points. You misunderstood my position about CPDLC and HF. I was making the point that (in the oz experience), CPDLC was better than HF voice communication. You know, over the ocean and in the boonies where pilots have to use HF. CPDLC is a marked improvement. But where VHF voice comms are available, they are far superior (if both pilots and ATC speak the same language). I estimate I could do 10 times the amount of ATC with VHF voice, than with CPDLC. You certainly couldn't attempt to use CPDLC in high traffic environments. Until you take the pilots out of the loop. I'm pretty sure it's developers were fully aware of this, but had the 'big picture' in mind. All the elements are already there. The TAAATS platform, the 'maestro' flow control program, CPDLC. It's not a huge step to have it all talking together to the avionics controls on a/c. Of course, all the individual elements would need to work significantly better
but you get the idea.
Secondly, your faith in TCAS is a worry. You mention the idea that pilots can have sit. awareness if they use it correctly. Absolute crap. Whether it's the tech aspects, or the human side, it isn't happening. TCAS has limited ability to process targets, and if it gets too many (more than 25??), it just drops them off. Even engineers can't explain to me how or which targets it drops. Frequently, the threat a/c is merging/same direction, and TCAS seems particularly poor at identifying said threats (something to do with rate of change of threat). Planning in ATC frequently requires more than 9000' forward. eg. last week I had an arrival stopped at FL200 vs a departure on a different freq (at that time) climbing to FL180 (note to pilot- 2000' sep to stop
false RAs - efficient?). The descender thru FL240 queried where his traffic was (it was climbing thru FL110 and crossing) as he couldn't see it on TCAS. That wastes my time when I could be doing something else. It never used to happen. It is becoming more and more common (see other thread this forum), and I could go on and on, but I won't.
At the end of the day, capacity enhancements are governed more by available airports and runways than anything to do with ATC.
Happy holding.