Personally for me this this accident was all about complete loss of situational awareness and nothing to do with whether or not the pilots could hand fly the aircraft or not.
Yes, it was about loss of Situational Awareness (SA), but hand flying and SA are mutually interdependent. If you don't understand the situation, you can't adequately fly the airplane and manual flying helps you to maintain SA. Apparently the newer generation of pilots treats flying the airplane like playing a video game and they don't become a part of the airplane. It really shocked me to read the part where one of AF447 pilots commented to the others that they were going to crash. He had gained partial SA but about five minutes too late.
Early in the discussion of AF447, a non-pilot, who is a software designer commented that the auto-trim feature that had assisted the PF in pulling up into the fatal stall is such a good thing because it relieves the pilot of the task of trimming. The software designer did not understand that trimming is not an arduous task and actually is something that helps pilots maintain SA. Auto pilots and auto-trim are great for relieving the tedium of long hours of cruise but flying by pushing buttons does not promote SA. I contend it is just the opposite.