Salute!
TNX, fdr, some good thots you present here.
And make no mistake, I used Otto a lot in my thousands of hours in single seaters. I used altitude hold, heading hold, heading select and even flew a few "coupled" approaches in one jet. I did it to reduce workload - getting out maps, approach plates for an unplanned divert base, quick fuel checks using the tiny nav circular slide rule and so forth ( not that big E6B doofer). So I am not one of the manual flying at all costs pilots.
That being said, there is one big thing I like about getting as much hand-flying time whenever you can. It is the "feeling" when the plane does something that you do not expect considering either the Otto mode or your own control inputs or trim settings. You know........., you did this hundreds of times but this time is "different". When letting Otto do the climbout/letdown and such, you should be mentally flying the same profile and be able to see where your manual inputs would be in effect or where Otto did something completely off the wall.
On another thread, or maybe even here among the latest one hundred posts.....someone raised the issue of the newer pilots that had little time flying pure manual planes and were born and bred in the Atari/Playstation/Nintendo world of aviation. As you know, being in the first training unit, I worked with many of the initial Viper pilots, including raw nuggets still wearing brown bars. Our fears of them not being able to "fly" without the computers and full FBW were quickly dispatched. Nevertheless, we demonstrated as many of the "limiters" as we could ( we did not call them "protections" as the 'bus crowd does) , and we had plenty of ground school discussions of what the limiters were limiting..
Now back to your regular programming...
Gums...