Prioritize airspeed
The many crashes I see in the 76 sim are nearly always preceded by a loss of airspeed, whether or not an autopilot is used or installed. Certainly in the 76 if you look after the airspeed everything else will follow. If you don't look after the airspeed everything will fall apart. This applies in manual flight or in autoflight. Hence, if you are climbing, descending or on approach I firmly believe that you should have the autopilot look after airspeed first. Full coupling on approach is better, but if you can only engage one vertical mode, make it airspeed.
I can produce a crash 100% of the time in the sim when 2 cue by having the students set the power too low in a climb with VS engaged, or too low when approaching an ALTPRE level off.
I wonder whether autopilots tend to reduce our attentiveness and monitoring of flight instruments.