He showed quite a bit of flight test data indicating a much better and more precise speed control in gusty crosswinds, etc. with autothrottles on during manual flight.
That is not what I would have expected. I found on gusty automatic ILS's the A/T was a little sluggish and they gave a large thrust input which resulted in a trim change etc. etc. It was always lagging behind the a/c. On the other hand in manual flight, the inbuilt human sensors were operating ahead of the a/c and trends, and making gentle corrections much sooner with less power/pitch couple trim problems. Given that, on a gusty day, Vref usually had some add-on, I'd set a datum thrust and let the speed bounce up/down and leave N1% alone. My 'floor' was Vref not MCP speed. And quite often, if there was a smart reduction in speed you could sometimes sense it was about to be reversed and so did very little. I'm not sure the A/T was good at anticipation.