HSWL
Prior to moving onto the airlines I had 6000 hours total experience in GA over ten years. Of this total I had 235 hours of IF time. This was logged in accordance with the rules in Australia. Personally I rarely used the autopilot in climb and descent because quite frankly it wasn't very good at it and increased my workload. It was far easier to hand fly the thing during this time, when I was most likely to encounter IF conditions than let the A/P do it. With the such small amount of IF time I had compared to total time, and this was almost all on IFR flight plans by the way, in the tropics, I don’t think it would make any difference if you included A/P time or not.