First, wow, and I will never again complain about having a bad day at work!!!
I've worked with Human Factors Psychologists who've studied how training effects the mind, and the question of how to make it realistic has been around for a long time. I've been told that the root of the issue is, no matter how realistically you can simulate a scenario, if the human knows it's only simulated, they'll never react in a fully realistic way. The pilot still knows that there's no sudden crash at the end. The cop or soldier knows those plastic bullets flying at him won't actually kill him. And so forth.
Still, making training as realistic as possible ought to be a goal, and from what I've experienced, much firearm training isn't terribly realistic.
I had a long conversation once with someone who'd been in LE for about a decade. I can't recall quite what her role was, but she did describe it as "having the authority to arrest, but no duty to pursue." I think it was in parole enforcement or something. Anyways, she had the option to carry a weapon but not the obligation. She took the training that was available to her, which sounded quite a lot like advanced CCW training (moving, cover, concealment, compromised positions, point shooting, etc.) It culminated in a force-on-force simulation with simulated ammo, acting out scenarios and the like.
She said that as soon as she was being engaged by other people who were actually shooting back--and even knowing it was safe--she and many others completely forgot all the training and couldn't hit anything.
So kudos to the trainers for making it fairly realistic, right? But her takeaway was that, at least for herself, no amount of simulation would actually prepare her for a real gunfight. She chose not to carry, believing her odds were higher of injuring someone with stray shots, than of actually being shot herself. She was willing to make that trade and take the risk.
Anyways, that carries over into her view of CCW. She's not formally opposed to it, but she thinks it's a very bad idea, reasoning that if she and others who received training could fall apart under stress, how much worse would someone do if they only had the required 8 hours of training for CCW? Or 4 in some states, or 0 in others?
I will grant her point. It made me wonder where the tipping point is for me, at which I feel like I'm well enough trained. And I realize I'll never feel well enough prepared because crap happens and it'll always take me by surprise.
It also makes me think that training on scenarios with "shoot or don't shoot" decisions would be very helpful. The number of cases in which a pistol actually could be used effectively for self defense, without causing more chaos and collateral damage, strikes me as rather small.