Hello Organfreak;
Re "ignorance", no worries! I've made some glaring errors in this discussion in the past!
Re CBs, there was indeed a lot of convective activity in the SIGMETS for the ITCZ (Refer to Tim Vasquez's fine work in the early threads) and there were diversions on the part of some of the flights doing the crossing that night. But there is always convective activity in the ITCZ and almost always there are ways through it...done it dozens of times, although on the Pacific. One just watches the radar like a hawk, changing scales, changing tilts to "take slices" of the moisture levels and potential clearances of the tops, turns down the lighting and watches outside. When one is "in cloud", (ice crystals) it is rarely turbulent but sometimes a few bumps occur.
It can be quite misleading to look at a satellite image of such convective activity, superimpose AF447s route on top and conclude that they went through CB's, (not saying you're saying this, just saying you can't judge/conclude what any one aircraft/crew may have encountered/experienced by looking at such large-scale images). There are no conclusions to be drawn from the fact that the flights before and after AF447 made slight diversions.
I wouldn't for a moment say that the circumstances the crew faced were straightforward or just a bit more than routine. They would be quite disconcerting, which is the reason both training and SOPs are emphasized...to keep the process slow, deliberate, disciplined and on-track so that mistakes aren't made in procedure. "Doing nothing" accomplishes two things...it calms one to permit assessment and action according to SOPs, and it prevents one from making irreversible mistakes (like shutting down wrong engines, etc). Except perhaps for the rejected takeoff and (obviously) TCAS/GPWS/Stall warnings, there are no events which require immediate, instant actions on the part of the PF alone. Loss of airspeed indication is not an emergency, it is a minor abnormal for which there is ample guidance and resources.