True enough. But the quotation illustrates wh the presubstituteystem is putting onto flight decks, as did the captain's fatal mistake.
I'm not sure I buy that, but at best it's like saying that riding a bicycle with training wheels is better experience than riding a tricycle. It begs the question "Can you ride a real bicycle?"
Sims are nice for lots of things. I like them. Familiarization (I just used one to learn the GFC-700), instrument and other failures, and, to a limited extent, approaches. But they don't simulate flying between sloping layers, forward visibility through a rain storm or ice, machine-gun TRACON controllers, controller mistakes like vectoring you through final, or a hundred other things that happen in the real world. I had all of those examples before I finished my instrument training, safely in the hands a CFII who really had been there and done that.
I don't even consider it to be "real" practice under the hood unless I have filed IFR and am working with ATC. And yes, I log the sim approaches but I don't consider them to be the same as real ones.
Quite a bit, probably. Many of us have passed through the period where everything was crystal clear and we knew with absolute certainty that our opinions were the right ones. That is also the period where we knew we were going to live forever. Glorious in many ways, but frustrating because we could almost never convince the world to see things the right way --- our way. As time passes you will become less certain about many things. It's part of growing up.
It's sort of the like the old joke about the teenager who couldn't believe how stupid his father was, then when he got into his twenties he became amazed at how much his father had learned.
I'm not attacking you or putting you down; I'm just making a general observation on human nature.