There's a difference between knowing where the bodies are buried enough so you can point someone away from the graveyard and knowing where the bodies are buried enough so you can point someone to the exact grave they are looking for.
In both cases, pilots need to know and understand the equipment they're flying but its the difference between knowing what each system does so you can disable it and take control vs knowing how each system works so you can troubleshoot and try to fix it.
To me, you need more of the former with pilot skill than you do the latter. After all plenty of accidents that no amount of troubleshooting have solved (or would have been able to solve) but disabling/ignoring the system error and flying the plane woud have prevented....
Lion Air 610 was less than 60 seconds from when MCAS activated, disabling MCAS and hand flying would have been the only recoverable solution.
US Air 1549 was less than 4 minutes from the bird strike and though engine restart was attempted, hand flying was the only recoverable solution.
United 173 held for 48 minutes and ran out of fuel troubleshooting a gear light, ignoring the light and hand flying would have been the only recoverable solution.
United 232 lost all hydraulics required to control flight control surfaces, hand flying was the only recoverable solution.
Air Canada 143 exhausted all fuel due to a unit conversion error and became the Gimli Glider, hand flying was the only recoverable solution.
Ethiopian 302 disabled MCAS only to re-enable it to catastrophic effect when they failed to recover, hand flying would have been the only recoverable solution.
The list goes on.
As its usually drilled into primary students heads, first, fly the damn plane.
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