A pilfering 7 is an anachronism and an area Australia badly lag the rest of the world. Every single player in the French 23 can pilfer.
IMO that’s irrelevant and also misleading.
Whilst pilfering skill is practiced across the board there are players who rarely make turnovers. Every player in the Australian team CAN pilfer also. But, just like the French, most of them rarely do. For example, Nic White obviously can make a turnover and won us a game with one last year, but it is not a skill that is going to determine if he is in the team or not. What teams do need is a number of players across the field that can create turnovers and, in most teams, that still includes at least 1 back rower. It doesn’t have to be a 7 (bearing in mind that not every country plays their open side in the 7 jersey) but most teams have at least one of their flankers, a front rower and another forward who play hard over the ball as a member of the pack. Plus at least 1 centre. Wingers & fullbacks are also increasingly good at it as turnover opportunities often happen in the wide channels.
When you say it is an anachronism for the majority of the reign of Michael Hooper it has not been a priority of Australia to play a pilfering 7. And I am not being critical of Hooper - he was a fantastic player and one of Australia’s finest but he was not a prolific pilferer. And there were times when he played with two other backrowers who weren’t either an Australia really struggled to create meaningful pressure at the breakdown. So the place where Australia has been lagging the world is not because we emphasised a pilfering 7, it’s IN PART (because there isn’t one single issue that has been a problem for us) because we lacked on ball pressure.