I partnered a dude in the sim once who had been a metro captain. He could hand-fly really well but his autopilot skills were crap. He would revert to manual flying at any hint of getting behind the autopilot which was good, but it was a symptom of having poor automation skills which was not so good. It may be that this bloke had similar problems and he was relying on manual skills to make up for deficient automation skills, or he may have had a poor checker, we will probably never know the full story.