MR8, couldn't agree with you more, its not about ego or proving you are iceman.
For an experienced airline pilot, hand flying must be a motor action or an over learned process, that requires minimal mental effort, so that they can cope with other tasks.
If a pilot is rusty, or worse, has never developed good hand flying skills they will have a significantly higher cognitive workload the day they have to hand fly, whether it is a gusty x-wind approach, autoflight system abnormal, windshear recovery or Carnarsie arrival into JFK. Lack of hand flying practice means they will have no extra capacity to maintain good situational awareness or deal with any failures.
All of our major incidents in the airline have required solid flying skills to recover the situation, (KG, SAN, JNB etc). Yes leaving flying to the automatics gives a better performance 99% of the time, but in these highly automated aircraft we are there for the day when it all does not work as advertised, then we have to take over smoothly and seamlessly. This requires that we rewuire some level of practice, to maintain our hand flying motor skills. Anyone who does not understand this is either in denial or just plain thick.