I used to fly an approach a week with AP, FD And AT off. FOs would react as if I was insane. We used to have to do a raw data ILS on PTs at Frontier, but they stopped doing it after COVID, iirc.
I usually hand-fly to FL220 or so, and down from FL220. I disconnect the autothrottles about half the time, and the flight director comes off if I'm not required to use it.
Interestingly enough, my FOs seem to pick up on it and when I encourage them to hand-fly they often do it well. I see it more on the line than I used to, which is promising. My favorite line when they're struggling with automation on a visual approach is "Hey, look up for a sec. That's an airport, this is an airplane. Just fly down there and land," and damned if that doesn't fix the problem pretty much every time—and make subsequent visual approaches better when they use the automation.
I do occasionally hear something like "You're the only captain I've ever seen do that," but the generation that flies with me will be a lot more flexible when they upgrade.
For me, the full automation approaches ARE the proficiency approaches.
At the end of the day, the automation is there to help us, not the other way around.
That said, I also understand refusing an airplane if the automation is deferred in a situation where it will cause SA to diminish/fatigue to increase; I can only imagine a 12+ hour flight would fall into that category. I wasn't there.
Shrug.
