>>At the risk of being declared behind the times, my feeling is that dive and drive is harder to screw up bigtime than cooking up a glideslope, especially after a long duty day.<
I think you're talking round dials but your point is also perhaps valid with glass.
Some of the nifty "build the glideslope" FMS techniques are great in the sim but a real soup sandwich if you miss a step or forget to enter a constraint. Some of the Boeings have a bad habit of entering go around mode at MDA (or whatever it's called these days) if you forget to reenter the runway in the box at the right place when building the approach manually. You see the runway, pop off the autopilot to land and the plane thinks it's doing the missed so the autothrottles go full bore (well, almost) just when you think you have the landing made. If the autothrottles were popped off with the autopilot, they miraculously reengage just when you don't want them.
Fortunately, more and more non-precision approaches are already in the box with VDP's and pseudo glideslopes these days.