So someone somewhere decided on a compromise. And I guess the reason was money
Maybe. But there is at least one regional operator in Australia operating the ever-so-easy-to fly Saab 340, that mandates the autopilot SHALL be used at all times be it a visual circuit or IMC. This is not because it is safer pe se, but because someone has read CRM and TEM and all that stuff pushed out by the University of Texas and is now convinced that hand flying any aeroplane is potentially dangerous and therefore to be avoided like a plague.
So now you have the ridiculous situation when once perfectly capable pilots are forced into twirling knobs and pushing buttons like a kid flying his radio controlled model aeroplane around a sports oval. And of course, once this crap goes into the company operations manual and in turn gets the wise old CASA nod of "approval" the rot inevitably sets in and the once capable pilot gradually sinks into a lazy hazy daze of automation. But what about his recurrent simulator training? Most of that will be automation, too. Despite countless research papers that warn of the dangers of automation complacency, (I am sure these are rarely ever seen by airline ops management people) the juggernaut of blind reliance on automation rolls on.
Read the editorial comment in Flight International 21-27 July 2009. Among other points it says "airline safety advance has stalled..pilot training looks like the key..it is high time the regulators and airlines reviewed how recurrent training is done in modern aircraft..in all the loss of control accidents over the past 20 years the aircraft could have been controlled..several involved failure to manage a stall..to describe it as pilot error is an oversimplification, obscuring the fact that the pilot was not trained to deal with the situation..conditioned trust in normally reliable automation...failure of their recurrent training to reinforce basic practices.
Ho hum! heard it all before. Now lets get back to those wonderful lazy real time LOFT exercises in the simulator - on full automatics of course..