It's assumed that you have the required skills to operate sans autopilot/autothrottle no?, that was part of your training and checking? How would your op's react should you decline to dispatch in a 737 with the autopilot written up?
And you know what. Come to think of it, I can't think of any time during my Alteon sim course on the NG where I was able to just fly the thing without the use of Autothrottle for an entire flight. Yet I am expected to operate the aircraft with an u/s Autothrottle as permitted by the DDG.
Another accident comes to mind of Turkish Airlines Flight 1951, where the RAD ALT failed during a autocoupled approach. A major factor in the accident being the flight crew being so disconnected from what the automatics were doing that they allowed the aircraft to crash.
I have experienced a RAD ALT failure on the NG after a successful ILS capture, the autopilot disconnects after 3 seconds of the RA flag. Not a great place to be dumped into a situation where you are called upon to hand fly when you were least expecting it. Especially when most of us are so used to poling the thing around only after we're fully configured.... You soon forget how much power you've gotta apply when you select Flaps 40 when your 'doing it old school'....
My arguement - maybe we're becoming so reliant on the automatics, that we're becoming disconnected from what the aircraft is actually doing or trying to do, and that by maintaining our manual flying skills, we would be in a better place to monitor the automatics and take over when the system fails us....