The plane changed modes and nobody realized it. That amazes me. To have different modes where the controls and indicators do different things and not have that information readily apparent? Ok, this is where you might could use better training. But gee. Like you said, another page on the ECAM would have been fine. You could have put a couple of wooden mechanical airplane models on sticks manipulated by the computer to show the top two best guesses for situation and ended up with something better than what they had.
I think the worst part of that disaster was that aside from engineering/program/integration management, I don't see any particular group of people that were directly at fault. Yet it all came together in a disaster. I find that situation unacceptable.
This claim is directly contradicted by the cockpit transcript in the official accident report:
https://www.bea.aero/docspa/2009/f-cp090601.en/pdf/annexe.01...
At 2 h 10 min 22,1, the co-pilot notes that the plane is in alternate law.
This is definitely the case. Forcing humans, in an extremely stressful situation, to reverse engineer what different sensors are reading (or if they're broken), what their own control inputs are doing and what the computers are thinking/doing based solely on perhaps-misleading computerized annunciations and observed aircraft behavior doesn't end well.
Critical measurements -- like angle of attack -- must be shown explicitly (a recommendation of the BEA) to the humans and not solely reserved for computer-consumption. Furthermore, there is likely room for better presenting the current state of the sensors that affect the flight control computers, the status of all the automation, and the current flight control laws to reduce the "what is it doing now?" factor that is unfortunately so dominant in these incidents that combine aircraft upsets with system malfunctions, maybe as a synoptic diagram on its own ECAM page -- not crammed onto the PFDs for a pilot actively flying the aircraft.