Well, I just read the entire thread in one gulp. All I can say is the following is one man's opinion.
I've been on the Airbus at a very major US carrier for 27 years. Speaking for myself, if I don't make an effort to manually fly (as in AP off, FD off, AThrust off, and Bird ON) then my skills get rusty.
I've flown with MANY first officers who are not comfortable with manual thrust landings, and that's a problem with landing an Airbus strong gusty winds. Manual thrust, and a keen eye watching the airspeed trend line will give you better speed control than the autothrust. During discussions about this, I tell guys that every Airbus pilot should be equally comfortable with AT on or off. New guys get wide-eyed at this comment, and that's a poor reflection on Airbus initial training. New guys can shoot a perfect RNAV RNP to minimums and then a coupled go-around, but put them on a high and tight base leg in VFR conditions, and you can count on a total FUBAR. They've not been trained how to FLY the airplane.
With regards to practicing hand-flown ILS approaches (either FD on AP off or totally raw data) I do NOT hand fly when the workload is high, the weather is even remotely low, or the airport is busy, or it's the last leg of a long duty day.. But if I want to pre-brief a manual approach to my home field during a low traffic, good weather time, I see no problems with that. I do NOT just click everything off with no warning to the pilot monitoring.
I know some guys who are so good that they can fly to better than ATP tolerances on a sim check with no practice, but I'm not one of them. So, I practice when appropriate.
Besides, I still like to fly by hand.