IMHO an occasional manual sim exercise is no substitute for doing it every day in the real ac/. However, I do appreciate and sympathise with the long-haul guys, with 3/4 pilots, who have to share out 8 landings a month along with autoland recurrency. It's not an easy solution, and it might be those pilots, who at the end of a long boring sector, are faced with the need to suddenly sharpen up and re-discover those long hidden skills. Difficult; eve more so if they were never there in the first place.