1201, that’s a very good summary. Everyone with a pilot’s licence has flown aircraft without FDs but those skills do seem to atrophy and/or the use of them gets discouraged by poor training. The first jet I flew you couldn’t enable the FD below 1,000’, so you rotated to TO attitude, then monitored any trends, adjusting pitch if really necessary. Some of the recent recruits to the industry I fly with aggressively follow the FD at low level when it’s gusty and end up almost in a PIO; it certainly is uncomfortable, even if it isn’t unsafe per se.
Someone well known in the industry (who I have forgotten the name of) used to talk about “low/high gain pilots”, and how the former were much more pleasant to fly with as the control inputs were measured and necessary, as opposed to a continuous stirring of the pudding that didn’t affect the trajectory of the aeroplane.
It would be an interesting experiment in the sim to freeze the flight director on the horizon and see how different crews coped with it on takeoff...