Yes that's all very well, but I think Fursty has it right.
In terms of threat and error management, hand flying an aircraft for long periods in busy airspace increases the potential for making errors, and is therefore questionable in terms of safety. PM will have a doubled workload and PF will have reduced spare capacity for monitoring aircraft systems and situational awareness.
Above FL200, cabin crew will be coming into the cockpit, and the potential for these 'distractions' to lead to flying errors - especially in RVSM airspace - is also increased.
Now that we do not have navigators or engineers on the flight deck, the two remaining pilots need to do more than just fly, and this is probably one reason for the increase in the use of automatics - to free us up a little. This of course has the unfortunate side effect of reducing our practice in hand flying and we need to do something to mitigate against this.
Being required to perform and record manually flown approaches with no F/D and no A/THR on good weather days, (in a similar way that we used to do for our practice autolands) would be an easy way to start this process.