I never understood pilots who didn't want to "fly" the airplane as often as possible.
Depends very much on the enthusiasm of the pilot concerned and attitude of the operator. Once in the cruise and coffee is brought up to the flight deck, most pilots become so relaxed that in the end they simply cannot be bothered to disengage the automatics and hand fly even though ATC conditions would allow it. Then even if a pilot does have a crack at hand flying, chances are he will be rusty and height and speed changes become more obvious. That causes the captain or first officer to become more twitchy about public relations and it all gets too hard. Remember that some pilots can fly smoothly while others are as rough as guts.
The fact is the automatic pilot generally flies more smoothly than the average pilot. You only have to observe a coupled approach compared with a manually flown approach by a rusty pilot to see the remarkable difference in the way the aircraft is flown. One solution is to require simulator sessions to include 50% manual no FD no autothrottle flying and lots of manually flown circuits and landings. You will never get some operators to permit meaningful hand flying on line. The QAR would hang most pilots anyway with an inexhaustible supply of tea and bikkies with management afterwards.