Thanks for nice words, Diagnostic. All of us can improve our piloting skills, regardless of the thousands of hours and hairy moments.
My understanding of your eloquent posts (and please correct me if I'm wrong), is that your military flying was very different, in that you were very rarely using any form of (even basic) AP - yes? If so, then you were always "caught-up" with the exact state of your aircraft (through your ss!), in a way that a civilan pilot monitoring the cruise is much less able to be, unless hand-flying. Or do you believe I'm wrong?
I flew mostly single-seat planes. Had about 400 hours in a true two-seat interceptor. That plane had attitude hold, heading hold/select, mach hold, coupled A/P to the steering for attacks/missile launches ( and I used it once when firing an actual A2A roket - the Genie). Also could couple the A/P to the ILS for instrument approaches and "monitor", as many airline folks seem to do. My later jets had decent A/P functions and being the only soul onboard, I used it a lot when in IFR and had to switch approach plates or just get a grip on the situation. Of all, the Viper was the worse. Our FCS engineers resisted external inputs to the system. And to make matters worse, we had no warnings that the FCS was not accepting any further AoA commands for "altitude hold". So I lost a buddy over the glass surface of the Salt Lake as his jet gradually descended while he fooled with IFF codes and frequencies and such. The Airbus is the opposite philosophy of the Viper engineers, although I always thot we could have had a much better A/P.
You are correct, Diag, that when not relaxing and letting otto do the flying that we were much more aware of EXACTLY what our planes were doing. Nature of the business, and I would not expect the commercial pilots to fly at the edges of the envelope just to get from point A to point B. Just think about flying 13 or 14 hours over the ocean from the U.S. to Europe or Hawaii in your chair right now. No restroom or help from someone.. Did we use otto? You bet.