Originally Posted by
Wilfortina
But no, you’re not encouraged to. Do it if you want, but I’ve never had anyone suggest that I do so
This might be a little misleading within the spirit of the question. Talk to virtually every pilot on the line and they'll agree that hand flying is a good thing. While you might not ever get a "hey, you should hand fly this thing," it's more or less implied that there is benefit from doing so.
To OP, I regularly hand fly it into the flight levels, and have seen people click the autopilot off around 6-8K feet if the weather is nice.
Edited to add: It's important to be mindful of the other things going on in the cockpit, though. On a really short hop, the other pilot could start getting task-saturated if you're hand-flying the entire thing (ATIS, landing data, MCP, approach brief, radios, announcements, etc). You're a team up there, and be aware when you're making them do everything. On a long flight where it's not all compressed, fly it as much as you want!