rudestuff
After THR HOLD, if you wanted to push up the power, wouldn't you have to disarm the AT though? I agree with everything you've said there by the way, and agree that if you manually increased thrust, to control speed the AP would pitch up, but the throttle isn't really "controlling" altitude, just influencing it, don't you agree? Anyway, this whole debate highlights the fact that some ATPL questions are debatable, literally, and therefore ambiguous.
At the end of the day, there are still many aircraft that have an FMS VNAV mode and no autothrottle.