I don't feel this response really addresses what I posted, which isn't that mechanical skills become deficient, per-se, but that the less you hand fly, the more peripheral awareness is diminished during manual flight regimes; that is to say, when the mechanical flying skills fall below the level of automaticity due to disuse, situational and position awareness are necessarily impacted... but without the ability to handfly and, in the process, maintain adequate situational and positional awareness, we're allowing automation to lull us into a false confidence about our position and situation, I feel.
The mechanical flying skills (and recognize that automation skills are simply mechanical flying skills by proxy) ARE the foundations of flying; everything else stacks on top of that, so they SHOULD be overlearned to the point of automaticity, and they should be practiced to ensure they remain there.
I'd also suggest that "available scholarly articles" are almost certainly materially deficient, even where they suggest acceptable data, data that concurs with consensus, or data that agrees with a particular point; it is extremely difficult to implement and instrument a study in these domains with an acceptable degree of scientific rigor and achieve a material, contextually-applicable conclusion. You, yourself, cited an example of this in that "they all seem to use 747 drivers."
Keep the airplane flying, keep the airplane going where you want it, and everything else, in that order.
My 82¢.
-Fox
