Being a mostly fly-by-wire airplane(all but the ailerons), the 170 is very dependant on the flight guidance panel. Turning off the FD often ****es off the airplane resulting in the loss of the autothrottles and generally other annoying alerts. Should be no problem to continue flying the airplane, unless you decide to turn the flight guidance back on. Then it requires a lot of button pushing. I have seen on several occasions where the flight guidance seems to be driving me counter to what I would normally do on a glidepath. The way it has been explained to me is that the FD doesn't want you to climb or level off, so it creates small flight path angle modifications to get you back on glidepath. The 170 was designed to be flown by the computer, it has more in common with an airbus while the 145 has more in common with a Learjet. Not saying one is better than the other, just different animals.

On another note, I understand flying raw data to keep fresh, but shouldn't we all be using the highest level of automation available to us on a regular basis? Its the turboprop mentality that has people driving jets around at high subsonic speeds with 50+ people and hand flying. When the crunch is on, give the jet to george and free up the brain bytes. That's why the engineers and test pilots put him there.