RE: skating skills in Sokolovskaia's group, remember that both Samarin and Kondratyuk had coaches before her (same with Rukavitsin's students, too), and she doesn't seem to have many/any students who actually trained their foundations with her from the beginning. That in mind, you might be better off looking at some of the previous coaches for each to understand where the differences come from.
On the topic of Russian men and PCS - and non-Russian men and PCS, and women of all nationalities and PCS, and just PCS in general - the whole concept of a 'PCS skater' is inherently flawed. PCS isn't a single score, but rather, a total of 5 scores, and realistically very few skaters will be genuinely strong in all of them. The skaters who tend to be strong across all components tend to be extreme generalists, i.e. guys like Jason Brown or, controversial comment incoming, Yuzuru Hanyu, and the current CoP doesn't favour generalists unless their name is Hanyu (really, doesn't favour anybody except jump specialists right now).
Also, people still refer to PCS as 'artistry', but several PCS categories are technical components, not artistic ones. Essentially, SS is wholly technical, TR mostly technical, CO half-and-half (this is where ice coverage gets counted, after all), IN is mostly artistic and PE is wholly artistic. So, what you end up getting is some guys like Samarin who excel at the technical components (skating skills) and some like Kondratyuk who excel at the artistic components (performance). Because corridor scoring is a thing, being good enough at one component will save you if the judges like you, but being bad enough on one of them is a death sentence if the judges don't like you, but this kind of corridor scoring even happens within individual component categories if there is one aspect that you're either good enough or bad enough at (i.e. having great speed can save your SS scores if your edges aren't the deepest and deep enough edges can save you if you're slower on the ice than my obese Nan trying to climb a flight of stairs). And, is goes without saying, the if the judges like you part is where good old politicking comes in.
Super controversial comment incoming, but this is exactly where the issues with Mishin's students lie. Basically, 90-100% of what comes under TES and 50% of what comes under PCS would have been the Technical score under 6.0, and the other 50% of what comes under PCS would come under the artistic score. The sort of corridor scoring that happens now with PCS happened just as much under 6.0, it was just less obvious to the average viewer; if you had great jumps/spins/spirals/general-elements but week technical components (poor skating skills, no/few transitions, poor ice coverage) you could still get a high technical score, so for a very long time these particular components went ignored in favour of technical elements (now TES) and artistic components, and this is evidently how Mishin is still coaches, which is who so many of his students lack in SS/TR but are strong on PE in particular.
A LOT of coaches, not just Russian, are still playing catch-up with the CoP and coaching like they're still under 6.0 (as you said, stuck in the past), and to some degree this won't really change much until the coaches who started coaching under the CoP outnumber the ones who spent the majority of their coaching careers under 6.0.
But anyway, that's enough of my senseless rambling, I need to be up for work in the morning.
These guys are doing their best and don´t deserve this hate.
