Centaurus, your Chinese SIM story is very scary. I suspect that the Chief pilot was not up to the job, and that he probably was one of those delightful barons who did not like a woman (the interpretor) or you pointing out his mistakes.
Given the Chief pilot's appalling lack of ability I would have let the SIM crash. No point saving a person's embarrassment if they are clearly not up to the job and peoples' lives might be at stake.
A colleague who now flies with another asian airline sat on the jumpseat on a line flight and during the climb watched both pilots reading newspapers that obscured the instruments, and he later had to speak up when they had both mis-set the arrival QNH by 8mb.
Back to the thrust levers. Flying Airbus, we keep our hand on the non-moving levers on approach and the other hand on the side stick. At any moment something could happen or a failure or a runaway might occur which would require instant manual reversion, or a Go-Around, so the hands should be on the controls.
As far a nudging or helping the A/THR, I suppose that on Airbus we learn to trust the A/THR and how it will react, (or not react) coupled with good instrument scanning. In theory, we could use the levers in a similar way to Boeings: nudge the levers just forward of the CLB gate and back to speed up, and backward from the CLB gate to limit the maximum thrust available to the A/THR to slow down.
However we should not invent our own procedures, because there may be unintended consequences.