Two's in - great post.
HC - That depends on how you want to define the level of competency and what tasks you expect that competency to cover.
In the offshore world it may simply be to fly a manual ILS to recover to base - in other areas of heli aviation the manual competencies may be many and varied.
Try using automation to get a winchman onto a pitching fishing vessel in the dark and see how much use it is! Even the rad-alt hold might not be good enough to give the precision required.
I have been lucky to fly and teach the whole gamut of general handling exercises on every type I have converted to and spent much of my life assessing and honing the pure handling skills of many pilots as well as their use and monitoring of AP systems - both are vital skills and equally perishable.
Let's not pretend that we don't need to be able to fly the aircraft.
I think trying to merge a discussion about relevant handling skills for CAT and SAR into one conversation is always going to cause confusion. But knowing how you can't see beyond SAR I'll humour you. Yes for SAR there are a couple of different factors, one is that as you say it's generally necessary to manually fly a winch man onto a pitching fishing vessel. And it's quite tricky too, although like anything it gets easier with practice. Although even I know that radalt height hold is pants and so last century.
And secondly with SAR, in a call out if you get a minor malfunction it harder to terminate the mission whereas eg with offshore CAT it's easy and normally the best thing, to RTB. So like any design (physical or strategic) if you want to make the discussion about all things and all people, it will inevitably be diluted and dysfunctional. Therefore since this thread is about automation management and you are a manual flight apologist, perhaps you should start your own thread on manual flying skills in which all your big-balled hero colleagues can participate? No doubt when you eventually reach civvy street we will all benefit from your "right stuff"(!).