Lingo Dan's comments reminded me - just why has the term become the more verbose "degraded visual environment" rather than just "poor visibility"? 25 letters to 14 - and that's without calling it "poor vis" as most of us use!
And absolutely, use autopilot whenever wx poor, as it was here with 2800m vis and 200/300ft cloudbase, but with two pilots, as LD says, why not one practice hand flying (some of the time) if confident cloudbase is 500ft with say 5ks + vis, with the other monitoring of course? Maybe it does happen in the NS - does it? Is is permitted even?