737 Driver
I see the wisdom in much of your post, one thing to keep in mind though is that we have glaringly incomplete CVR facts, not a transcript just some snips possibly selected to shore up a particular point of view.
This makes it impossible to know all of what was discussed etc during (and before) the flight or the full extent of interactions.
As I have said before something was going on while the trim was in cutout mode, we just have not been told what.