2000 hours on 330's - mainly Trent, sometimes P & W (yeuch !).
Never taken the autothrust out, our stats have shown that several of the tailstrikes recently, in particular the 321 also were flown in manual thrust, practise in the sim, it wasn't designed to be flown in manual thrust unless in bad turbulence.
It does hunt, it sometimes dips into VLS, so what, it ain't going to stall or come anywhere near it. VLS is a reference speed with lots of protection left in normal operations.
Compare a manually flown approach to an autopilot flown approach - you will notice that with the autopilot in, the thrust doesn't hunt. That tells me that we are all guilty of PIPO and end up blaming the autothrust. There is a lot of inertia, the engines are large.
Finally, I wouldn't be adding a knot here or a knot there to Vapp, when it all goes horribly wrong, the lawyers will come a hunting
