In terms of skill, I think one ought to be able to do a visual approach just by looking out the window. For the bean-counting crowd, it saves a bit of fuel and time, (by the flight data, not a lot of savings though), and it maintains skills such as self-perception as part-of-the-machine, S.A., judgment, timing, energy-management, scan, (outside & in), & hands-&-feet.
Love it 100% + 'confidence in your own abilities'. It was the norm in the old days for every line pilot & IMHO this should be part of a command upgrade check. If you can't do it you should not be in command of a commercial a/c. I've experienced carriers where the visual arrival, for cost saving, was written in the books. However they did not train it nor ask captains to demo it so the F/O's apprenticeship was not enriched. What happened on summer CAVOK days was the number of G/A's due unstable approaches increased alarmingly. After the winter months no-one had been practicing. Solution? discourage manual approaches, or if you do them, use the automatics.
Bean counting gone mad.
I still ask the question. How is that, in general, airline piloting skills are less than 2 generations ago? Some will disagree, but I think they are in their lucky bubble. During my varied airline exposure in both employer, technology and national culture I think it has.