Lodestar if you can't operate the aircraft through all stages of flight with the automatics then you have no business being there. It was always the problem during the early days of the 75 that guy's were getting confused and the most frquently asked question was 'whats is doing now?' The answer is not to reduce the aircraft to the level of a C150. Just about all of the losses of 757's have been crew induced, the same with the Airbus although here the leap in technological interface in the early days caused problems. It was an easy cop out by the instructers to say revert to manual, it is very rarely necessary or desirable to do so. What runs through all these discusions is the underlying belief that when the going gets tough then pilots must be pilots, you don't take the automatics out, you use the increased capacity to do what the automatics can't, think ahead, programme and operate the aircraft not reduce yourself to the level of mere driver and degrade the effectiveness of your other pilot who now has to monitor your flying in addition to his other tasks.