.... if you rarely hand fly, then you'll get the shock of your life when your entire AFDS breaks!
I wonder. I rarely do much hand flying, occasionally going until it's clean after take off (and then only in daylight and VMC). At night I can't recall the last time I disconnected before 1000'. That didn't seem to affect things when we recently had the aircraft drop back to alternate law, without any AP or FD. Although we were bit sick of it after 5 hours. And it never seems to be an issue in the sim.
Curiously, the pilots I've flown with who are most keen to do things manually, have the least awareness of what is happening around them, often pretty poor ability to fly the a/c via the automatics, and most curiously of all, the worst manual flying skills.
As for the reliability of the aids. I've seen a couple of autopilots fail on Boeings, but in every case, another was able to be engaged. Autothrottles die every now and then. I've never seen the F/D fail in 16,000 hours of flying Boeing, but it only took about 300 to see it happen on an Airbus.