If a mere (ex) navigator can join in - surely it’s just about capacity. Give the student something, anything, difficult to do in the air and measure their capacity. If they have enough they will cope with whatever the OCU throws at them. If they don’t then you could train them with a complete mini Typhoon / F35 and they still won’t.

In an ideal world we want to “download” training in some skills (eg radar handling) from the expensive OCU type to the cheaper training type but we are a very long way from an ideal world and that is the sort of thing that CAN be improved in the sim.

As I posted previously on this thread - the Finns ended up with possibly the best updated Hawk when they fitted a Glass Cockpit to the ex Swiss Hawk Mk66 aircraft.
Still a nice relatively nice aircraft and (relatively) fairly cheap,the T2 was definitely the Gold Plated option (but without gold plated fan blades apparently) :).

RAF Facebook page highlighting T2s operating from Valley today

https://www.facebook.com/royalairforce

Devil 1&2 ZK013, 018 currently over Northumberland.