Put me in with the "know your power settings" crowd. Yes the trend arrow is great, and yes it's another piece of magic that is foolish to become reliant on, for obvious reasons. And even when it does work, during a config change, level off, etc., it takes less of my attention (i.e., more of it available for the remaining items in my scan) to A) quickly set the thrust to the rough value from the list, scan through everything else, and then (about when it's stabilized) come back to the thrust and fine tune it with the trend vector, than it does to B) continuously watch the trend vector during a long slow thrust change to the precise final value (over the entire duration of the level off) where it's taking most of my attention.
Of course this is not helped by many EFIS setups omitting tick marks. A genius human factors move! So in the CRJ, my memorized power settings are where the right engine N1 needle is relative to the little "N1" label between the two gauges. 250 knots level clean below 10K is slightly above it, final approach with full flaps is slightly below it, etc.