Bob, I may have misunderstood your previous post but it seemed as though you were advocating manual flight when the pilot's understanding of what the software was doing eluded him because he didn't understand it. My point was that even in manual flight, you are interacting with the AP software and so you need to know how it behaves.
I thought you were proposing a sort of "when the going gets tough, disengage all the fancy hits and fly it manually" strategy, which is not the best philosophy and indeed has caused a recent crash in the N Sea. Re-reading your post you probably didn't mean that!