Well to all those by the seats of your pants aces out there, I too would love to fly manually from take off to TOC and TOD to touchdown without use of FDs or just relying on the standby instruments. However I have been warned that should anything undesirable happen and subsequent technical enquiries reveal that I had not used all the automation as designed, I will be deemed to be guilty of not following company SOPs wrt use of automation to accomplish a safe, smooth and comfortable flight. The company and the regulatory authorities take a dim view of anyone wanting to " improvise " to hone their basic manual flying skills!