Seems a weird way to go about business, RAT5. Happily i never encountered that, the airlines i have flown in encouraged and still do encourage us to fly manually on the line. Raw data, or at least Flight Director off flight without autopilot and autothrust is a normal thing to do.
Now, it is very easy to get lazy and leave all that nice stuff in, and many do that. But those that want to fly the damn thing without all the trickery can certainly do so. On the 737 i flew at least 50% of all my approaches "raw data", usually out of something like FL200, something that was required since my first linetraining flight. On the bus i am so far kinda lazy and only fly a third of my approaches raw data, but i'm working on that.
Sometimes it seems on here that this "maximum use of automatics at all times" is an attitude mostly found in the anglo-saxon influenced world (probably not the US though) and asia. But i might be wrong there. Central Europe seems to be wired a bit differently.