So they were happy to get us to hand fly in better weather, either with Flight Directors or raw data, and encouraged us to go as far down as possible on instruments,
Interesting comment from old pre-BA days. The debate is a little wider; it touches on guys not being able to do MK.1 visual approaches. Manual flying, under radar or LNAV/VNAV, FD or raw data should not be difficult. You follow you do not decide. Mk.1 visual you decide as well. That's a big part of the skill that is vanishing.