Alot of the flying is done using autopilot
Yes it is. It's in the nature of a long distance tourer that people don't want to hand fly in the cruise for several hours to IFR tolerances. Where I do agree with you is the need to hand fly the aircraft often to stay current.
My own practice is to fly about 75% of departures and approaches by hand when I am single pilot (it's important to stay current on autopilot approaches as well) and 100% on autopilot when carrying passengers which I do relatively infrequently. That works for me but YMMV!
(which is worrying, there are many CAPS "saves" caused by autopilot induced problems).
Really? How many and can you identify them?
"VMC into IMC, icing incidents, aircraft upset" seem to happen more often to Cirrus pilots than others.
Do they? I don't know for sure as I haven't seen any factual evidence either way and would be interested to see any numbers you can provide but, subjectively, I don't think the Cirrus is better or worse than most other SEPs in that regard.
Whether that assertion is true or not, there are far to many of those incidents regardless of the type of aircraft involved.
The common factor in that type of accident is most often the pilot's decision making and, as I said in an earlier post: Cirrus pilots have no monopoly on stupidity or incompetence (or bad luck come to that)!
Again: the answer, whatever the aircraft, is to do proper training and participate in safety initiatives
For a less experienced pilot, you can easily slowly end up being badly behind the airplane.
That's quite right. The Cirrus is classed as a Technically Advanced Aircraft. It has a lot more capability than many SEPs and learning how to use it properly is vital.
Again: that's why so much emphasis is placed on proper training and participation in safety initiatives. If you do that, it's easy to understand what's going on.
It's striking to me how high a proportion of Cirrus accidents happen to people who don't do that. But I suspect that's true of pilots of other aircraft types as well.