It must be realized that if your manual skills are rusty it will take more mental capability to fly the aircraft and leave less mental prowess to think about your next course of action or how to correct whatever problem you are dealing with. Your manual skills should be almost second nature. Do what ever it takes to accomplish that and when the day comes and its your turn to do your best to save a ship you will be ready.
Very true, such basic skills are and need to be "fully automated" tasks. No pilot (or whatever operator of almost any complex set of tasks) would be able to fly efficiently without having these skills as totally action models. The psychological load would simply be to great if every single action would be a considered response to a megaload of sensory inputs.
Having lost your level of "human automation" will not only make you slow to react, it also will make you bad to handle any additional stress factors.