I personally quite enjoy hand flying when the opportunity presents itself, I haven't yet had a Captain refuse to allow me to hand fly. I have though on several occassions flown with people who are perhaps to eager to switch off the automatics in conditions that are not really appropriate, usually these guys come from a GA background and can't get it through their heads that they are now flying an airliner and it is not always appropriate to fly this thing like the C206 they have been flying around the outback. I can assure you 99% of the times I have seen approaches or departures result in the writing of reports for exceedences, they are off the back of a badly flown manual procedure (myself included). Also when hand flying I couldn't agree more, you should be flying by looking out the window and not trying to construct some complicated circuit in the FMGC. The dangerous people in this game are not the ones who decide to rely on automatics they are the ones that have inappropriate use of the automatics and are quite happy to say 'watch this' as they disconnect everything with weather on minima in a busy airport environment.