I missed out on this thread last time round, probably because I didn't have an IR or IMC rating then. I do now, though, so here are my thoughts:
First of all, I would guess that asking an airline pilots what he does at work, as F3G suggested, might not be the best idea. Airline pilots fly on a very regular basis, and have more regular checks than IMC pilots. They are extremely current. Depending on the airline, they might well have the autopilot on for pretty much the whole flight - but they are current enough that they still retain the hand-flying skills (although haven spoken to some airline pilots about their colleagues - it's never them, always their colleauges! - maybe that's not actually the case!)
An autopilot achieves two things: it relieves the boredom of flying S+L on instruments for long periods, and it relieves the workload during the approach and the depature.
For the S+L segment, I say use the autopilot. It doesn't take a huge amount of practice to fly S+L and follow a VOR, but it is very tedious and therefore tiring, so get the autopilot to do it for you.
For approach and depature it's not so clear, because this is where occasional IMC flyers, IMHO, will very quickly loose currency if they always use the autopilot. Also (and this may not apply for a simple one-axis autopilot), if you never use the autopilot, you may find that you are not proficient in its use. When I first started flying an aircraft with a decent autopilot, I always used to hand-fly the depature up to cruising level, but after I while I'd discovered that I'd forgotten how to set a target altitude in the autopilot - not forgotten to the point that I couldn't do it, but it took a bit of mental capacity to remember.
I eventually settled on the following: on the basis that most IFR flights are going to be there-and-back, on the way there I would hand-fly the depature and use the autopilot for the arrival, and on the way back I would reverse it. Of course things never go to plan, and you will always find that when you plan to hand-fly an approach, you'll get to your destination, find it's CAVOK and end up doing a visual approach, so you need to be flexible to keep current at both methods.
Of course your experiences may well be different to mine!
FFF
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