Uplinker,
You say:
"If a pilot actually wants to fly an aircraft hands-on, on a regular basis, then an airline in todays skies is not the place to be."
But also,
"But manual skills must be maintained"
As I see it, that's a contradiction. How can someone maintain their manual skills (let alone build them in the first place) without flying on a regular basis? Maybe you speak as someone who flew low tech aircraft for decades where it was "sink or swim," and from that have lodged some permanence of those skills into your brain; but if that's so, you're missing the obvious case of someone just starting out.
I'm at my first airline a little over a year, and here we fly usually 3-5 legs per day, 15 days per month. So the opportunities are there, and I take full advantage of them. I probably use the autopilot the least of the whole pilot group of 2000. By now I'm very comfortable and confident flying visually, but not so in IMC: it still takes my full concentration, I'm not always smooth (even when the air is), and I have airspeed/vertical/lateral deviations that come during lapses of attention on that parameter and are then quickly corrected with a jerk. All the hallmarks of a task saturated rookie. (And given the low percentage of the time that it's IMC and we're not coming down a complicated arrival where I need the autopilot, it's what can only be expected.) But on the overall, I can hold it together.
If that is the (moderate) level to which I have so far developed by flying as much as I can, what can everybody else do? What 90% of the captains do 90% of the time is to only turn the autopilot off below 1000 feet, configured and on speed. No turns, no level offs, no speed changes, no flap changes, no course interceptions or tracking, no altitude holding, no nothing. Just click the button and fly it in a straight line following the flight director till it's time to flare. Including on the clearest and calmest of days into the quietest airports! It's bewildering.
And I have no reason to assume that most other FO's are doing anything but following this example. So given my experience (and before I came to the airlines, I already had a few thousand hours of very hands-on flying) how comfortable and able in their flying can most of these guys become? Especially the large segment of them who came to the CRJ from single engine Cessnas with a smattering of Seminole time. How, in this scenario, is anybody supposed to learn to fly the airplane, much less become comfortable in it?
You suggest that a minimum standard of 1 approach without autopilot be performed every other month, and I find that to be absurdly low.
I wrote this post during a commute and since I got to look at the thread last, someone else suggested an autopilot-off approach every 4 months! And that's a hand flying advocate! Honestly that suggestion as an improvement is completely shocking to me. Here's to hoping that's some strange British sarcasm that flew over my head.