I did hear one interesting comment from an oldie, who used to pole manually around the sky in & out of some challenging places; thus he is on our side, but...
he had come to the conclusion that some airlines were satisfied that if they could teach their cadets to use the autopilot to bring the a/c into landing configuration at 1000'-500' and in the slot then they should be capable of disconnecting and completing the last 60secs of a gravity defying challenge without screwing it up too often. If this was achieved on 99.99999999% of the flights everyday with only a couple of G/A's then job done. They had kept their side of the bargain with the pax. Every 6 months the pilots jumped through historic hoops and the XAA was satisfied. It s going to be very difficult to shake them from that philosophy. There does not appear to be any incentive. Sadly he might be correct. Those CP's who like to encourage their crews to be more pilot than operator are free to do so, but it will not be easy to mandate it across the board. What is disheartening is that there are some operators who forbid/discourage those with the manual piloting skills to use them.