This is more a case of failure of basic flying skills - monitoring your airspeed is one of the first things you learn when you start flying.
A lot of recent crashes have occurred because Pilots were unable to fly their aircraft after relatively benign failures.
As for landing the 737 - when I flew it it was "Manual flight = Manual thrust". Depending on conditions I would reduce the thrust earlier or later as required during landing.
The only time A/T was used was on an autoland.
Not sure why it needs to be any more complicated than that.