I have the feeling that if you took the gamut of techniques from 'hand-flying all the time' to 'only taking the autopilot off at 80 feet to land' the mean has migrated in the direction of the latter over the years.
I spent most of my career flying light aircraft single-pilot, many of which simply had no autopilot. I guess I carried over an attitude that an autopilot is something in the 'nice to have' category rather than an integral design feature when I moved to flying Transport Category aircraft so that some people would get upset that I really wasn't all that interested in using it for everything all the time, including flying a basically visual pattern, say. I prefer to stay heads-up rather than going head-down to program the automatics if I am close-in with the field in sight; this makes perfect sense to me but seems to be heresy to some guys.
Too, I have noticed some of the younger guys baffled by some aspects of basic hand-flying such as a smooth touchdown on a cross-wind landing, when I was unable to give them absolutely quantifiable data to use.
You know, 'Use the sight picture to put the airplane where you want it and then try to "feel" what it is doing.' That makes sense but it's not quantifiable in the way that programming an FMS is. So I think some guys really like the quantifiable stuff and let the hand-flying stuff go as 'old-fashioned', perhaps?
I usually just excuse outbursts of hand-flying as 'getting ready for my sim check.' The truth is, though, I still enjoy hand-flying the aircraft. That is not to say that I do not know how to manage all the automatic stuff too. Oh, and in my spare time practice good CRM. (You know, if I really, really wanted to work with other people I would have been a pyschoanalyst or perhaps a counsellor to troubled youths. I went into flying to work with machines, and I end up working with people! Go figure...)
Shouldn't one be able to do ALL of this very well, preferences aside? That is what we are paid for, after all.
It sure does make it easier in the sim when you already can hand-fly the thing without too much strain, since the next thing that seems to happen is an autopilot failure of some sort once some situation arises.