I don't have any technically knowledgeable comments to make, but I think if you don't fully understand what happened, there's no excuse for doggedly insisting one group of people involved should be given the benefit of the doubt and the other not. It's reasonable to assume we lack something when it comes to the crew's POV.

Actually, I have one thing to contribute, that I often think of whenever I read about an air disaster. Experts frequently say "why didn't the operators do logical thing X?", and I think there is a practically universal answer. Whenever something unusual goes wrong, it is likely to upset your existing logical model. You know either your logic is faulty or the inputs to your model are wrong, but which is it and how?

It's easy to say "just do A, B, and C as trained", but once jolted out of your mental context, you probably can't regain it in a few seconds or minutes before crashing. The impossible task is not to know the necessary actions according to the book, but regaining the trust that they are the right ones in the face of something unexpectedly violating your assumptions.

Developing a new logical model for reality is very difficult even for highly trained people, particularly under time constraints and life-or-death pressure. Or, even the meta-problem of knowing whether it is time to develop a new model of reality.