My point was that I see all the time, both training and on line, people who only need to revert to "old fashioned" flying because they have screwed up the selections - there is nothing wrong with the automatics. They are increasing their own and the rest of the crew's workload unnecessarily. And then they often blame the system saying "it failed" when it is working as advertised.
I agree entirely with needing to be completely proficient on hand flying as well for the rare occasions where it does fail, or in the corporate environment the commoner situation where you need to fly a profile that the AP/FD system cannot cope with.
As I said, it is both, not either/or.