By the way, what exactly annoyed you?
Implicit criticism of your sim partner, who clearly understood the learning objective of the sim session better than you did.
(Apologies for my crack at your English)
but encouraging the students to constantly put the AP on suggests the instructor felt a lack of ability in hand flying that might distract from the course material
dan the weegie, admittedly its a long time since I did the MCC/ JOC, but my memory of this course appears very different to yours. For example, I remember one session, flying LGW to AMS and spending most of the time holding over SPY discussing fuel management and diversion strategy whilst dealing with a hydraulics failure.
Can't say I'd have been terribly impressed if my sim partner decided to fly this manually.
As I remember, the first 2 or 3 sessions involved manual flight and you were expected to be "up to speed" with flying the aircraft by the end of that.