The controversy over the report findings in this case are as nothing to other events in the US (and elsewhere) which were filmed and broadcast live as they happened. If people choose not to believe the evidence of their own eyes and the opinions of experts, but seek to put their own interpretation on what happened and the motivation of those involved, then the study becomes less than scientific, fake news for want of another expression.
A far easier explanation of everything that seems wrong is that the newspaper reporters at the time demanded an instant assessment at the site of the crash from anyone they could talk to. The story was published, the purient curiosity of most readers was satisfied and nobody was interested in later correcting the details because there was no longer any public interest and it had no relevance to the cause of the crash.
It is clear from the photographs that some portion of the aircraft slid along the ground after the initial impact. The final position of the tail section with the tail and rudder assembly virtually intact suggests that the sliding must have taken place while the rear fuselage was upright. The only thing that was missed is that while sliding it also rotated as would be expected with one virtually intact wing still attached. It hit the ditch and pitched over inverted. Case solved, probably.
The only requirement for this scenario to work is that the aircraft hit the ground in a vertical bank, which is supported by the available evidence and reports.
What doesn't work is a scenario that has the pilot somehow levelling the wings between striking the railroad embankment and final impact with the ground. All the documents produced to date suggest that this was the least likely sequence of events.
How the aircraft broke up is only important in establishing what components, that may have been contributory to the accident, may have been damaged or gone missing. Giving the same evidential weight to contemporary press reports against the final official report is likely to lead to conflicts in reconstructing events, as appears to have happened in this incident. The investigators were not lying, nor was there a corporate cover up, although the temptation and pressures to do so may have been enormous. Lockheed allegedly ended up losing more than 100 million dollars as a result of this and the whirl mode accidents. Public faith in the aircraft never really recovered and the age of a preferrence for pure jet travel dawned.