I highly recommend "Mechanical Jeb", which automates flying and landing.
Some do not like it and want to "Fly like Neil Armstrong".
But no astronaut ever flew (by hand) a launch vehicle into orbit, and none hand-flew the LM descent from orbit. Even when thy flew "Manual" the last few hundred feet down to the moon, it was a type of semi-manual more like automatic pilot that the astronaut manually interrupted to alter the projected landing location where they wanted to (if the projected location had problems like big rocks or the edge of a big crater, they could fly elsewhere). But if they were tilted say 10 degrees and let go of the stick, the LM guidance would correct to bring the LM to zero horizontal velocity and then point vertical so all that was needed was to reduce throttle to the right descent rate.
And "throttle" was not direct either. It was more like descend quicker (at say 10 ft/sec), descend slower (at say 3 ft/sec), or hover (descend at 0 ft/sec), rather than say reduce thrust by 5% which would cause an ever-increasing descent rate requiring a lot of throttle jockeying.
Anyway, for me what I've liked to do most in KSP is design and build the rockets, plan for things to do on missions, and fly those missions the way that "real" missions would be done. That said, I do think that when learning the game, everyone should hand-fly a rocket into orbit, to appreciate the difficulties and understand orbital dynamics better. But that is somewhat nerve-wracking and tedious to do for routine flying. Also, to hand-fly a landing on the Mun too (remembering to SAVE before de-orbit!), to experience the inevitable crashes due to starting the landing burn too late (high speed impact), or being too careful and beginning the landing burn too early so that it almost stops kilometers above the surface, wasting valuable fuel (likely running out). Or later timing the landing well, but taking a very long time in trying to actually soft land, hovering a few meters up but trying to kill the horizontal velocity, also risking running out of fuel. After those learning experiences, I think MechJeb is plenty fine and for me was more realistic.
