Look again at Rananim's post at the bottom of the previous page.
The second paragraph is, I feel, the most important point made this discussion.
There's a new breed of pilot who is actually afraid to take out the automatics and practise these essential skills.The same thing goes for non-precision approaches.Once every 6 months in the sim aint enough.And then when the ILS isnt working,you're left out to dry. Look at the KAL crash at Guam.Next time dont take the vectors the long way round for the ILS,go for the straight-in and shoot an NDB or VOR approach.One more for the memory bank and will keep you in good stead.Its called experience.
Having said that, automation is a great tool and should be used 95% of the time in busy airspace.
SOP's, peer pressure and, especially, the tribal culture of particular types, fleets, bases or companies themselves conspire to create this situation. It was always strange to me when effo's were pleased and a little awed when it was hinted a little hand flying perfectly suited the next approach. If anything the thought of manually flying a SID seemed even more daunting. Most of all, no autothrottle seemed to be a relatively common line occurence that caused eyes to roll to the heavens.
Significantly Ops manuals always seem to have a catch all paragraph permitting manual flying as when, Etc. However there can be a culture where this is ignored for the majority of the time. We then find folks uncharacteristically and at, perhaps inopportune, times throwing away both A/P and FD because, 'they're due in the sim soon.'
Rob