I occasionally fly with guys who break out in a cold sweat when I ask if they're ok for me to do a visual approach (the sweating starts before I mentioned the hand flown and raw data parts of my plan) to our home base on a cavok, no traffic day. I've had some very good reasons why we keep the automatics in that I had missed or forgotten (Airspace, CB drifting towards final approach track etc). But too often its feeble excuses from the same guys - "oooooow well it's been a long day" "I don't like paperwork" "...well...OFDM these days" or a small cumulus 20nm downwind of the field.
What an absolute embarrassment, we are professional pilots. Just because FR would rather you kept it in LNAV/VNAV at the risk of addling your brain flying a simple circuit on a nice day to an empty airfield, doesn't mean you should believe them - Nobody takes anything else they say seriously, why on earth wouldn't you believe that it's quite useful to be proficient at actually flying the plane... it seems preposterous this even needs discussing.
Most depressing is when LTCs spout this stuff, my last line check debrief consisted of the sage advice to climb to another level the exact instant it becomes the max in the FMC (complete with 10 minutes of gushing talk about how saving fuel gives him such personal satisfaction). This was followed by a lecture on how hand flying is distracting and uses valuable capacity. What kind of tosser cares more about 7kgs of fuel than about being able to fly the airplane should the need arise.
I hope it wasn't too arrogant of me to put that debriefing in the mental shredder upon vacating the crew room.