I think you underestimate what could be done with avionics these days. The more 'cruise pilots' show themselves unable to recover from relatively benign events like loss of airspeed indication, the more it becomes sensible for the avionics to do the work and not even go into a degraded mode (alternate law) where the pilot need be involved. There are now adaptive avionics that will allow military aircraft to recover after extreme and random battle damage as if they are flying normally. So do not make the mistake of underestimating how far automation and autonomous aircraft have come. Every time a human pilot screws up and loses the aircraft the argument is made again that the automatics could/would have made a better job of recovery had they been programmed to do so...