Barbie'sBoyFriend
I quite understand your points and naturally Turkeys don't like Christmas.
However I am not talking about how you and I might like airliners to be operated to suit us, but the safest way to operate them.
I am afraid the manually flown accident stats do not support letting pilots handle aircraft IF/PROVIDED/WHEN sufficiently reliable automatics can be engineered.
When the UK seriously set about developing autoland in the 60s the CAA said that for the system to be certificated (BTW nobody knew quite what sort of system it would turn out to be in those days) then it had to be an order of magnitude safer as a cause of fatal accidents than pilots at that time. This meant it was only allowed 1 fatal landing in every 10 million landings because pilots were scoring 1 in a million.
As I said in my post I have never heard of a fatal autoland since they started in the 70s but over that period of years there have been far too many manual landing accidents.
JF