Good OP.
I don’t think manufacturers, passengers or airlines will heed any of your comments though. They are working towards single pilot airliners - though goodness only knows why. There seems to be this impression that pilots and their training are too expensive. Do we say the same about medical doctors? - where errors might fatally affect one patient at a time, as opposed to potentially several hundred in one go if pilots get it badly wrong?
One concern is (lack of sufficient) training. Student pilots are being churned out from flying school, (having flown, what, 140 hours on a SEP?), straight onto highly automated jet aircraft, without actually learning to fly in a busy commercial environment on small non-automated turbo props. Basic fundamental flying skills and scans are not learned and coded into ‘motor programs’ in the brain - hence the AF447 F/O holding full backstick and deep stalling. Any airliner you do that to will stall. Weather appreciation is not learned or experienced as it is when flying a turboprop with deicing boots and props at FL180 in all the icing and turbulence.
I frequently forget to ask for flight directors off when flying manually, because I am so used to looking through the FD to my basic pitch, V/S and thrust settings.
Another concern is lack of manual flying. I am a guilty as the next pilot - If it is dark, busy, bad weather, or I am tired, the AP goes in so that I can better monitor the flightpath (and PM!). The reason is I don’t want to screw up, but the consequence is that my raw flying skills go rusty. If companies mandated manual flight until FL100 or similar, (some do), and if pilots had to log three or more manually flown raw data or visual approaches to land every six months, (as we used to do for Autolands), we might be able to prevent some of the rust building up.