Flew with a red-nosed carrier not long ago, on a cockpit fam flight. Beautiful visual approach into a fairly long and unobstructed runway, flown manually with manual thrust from around 9000ft. Aircraft was a strange mix of modern forward panel and jurassic overhead, jumpseat quite horrible but doable for a 45 min flight.
The take-off was manual flight and auto-throttle to around 15000ft.
Would rather, as in any day of the week and twice on Sundays, fly with a crew who are free to exercise judgement, and use automatics as and when it's the best option. Flying a short sector on a clear skies day, off a fairly quiet airport and into one that's even quieter, encountering almost no other traffic either enroute or in the terminal areas, is obviously a perfect opportunity to take the bull by the horns and do a spot of driving yourself. Any operation which has SOPs written specifically to prevent that, is run by a bunch of idiots. Probably the un-holy and culture destroying trinity of Lawyers, Accountants and Consultants.