Jayysus, ampan, why are you insisting so much on this?
Why should it even matter to me, or to others here, to determine or to establish whether the captain was indeed blameless or not? What answer do you expect? A simple yes or a no? It's such an ill-defined question in the first place that its answer, or spectrum of answers, are of no interest or practical value to understand what happened there and what it meant in the greater scheme of things for New Zealand. Let me give you two examples. 1. The German Wings FO who deliberately flew into terrain after locking his captain outside the cockpit, and 2. The Lion Air or Ethiopian crew of the ill-fated 737-MAX aircraft. In the former case, the FO is 100% to blame but in the latter ones? Ah, that's already trickier to answer. And even if we did have a definitive answer, what good would that possibly do?
I second others here who were either too young or, like me, just not born yet when this sad story took place. My primary interest is to understand the (chain of) events that led to the crash without trying to point fingers and to compare the instruments available to the flight crew then to what we'd have today. Training evolved some quantifiable bits over the last 40 years so some of today's nonevents thanks to the greater situational awareness that instruments give us could then easily snowball into unrecoverable situations. That's worth 5 min of consideration next time you get a RAIM alert on final.
Thanks for keeping this thread constructive or waiving your right to express yet another pointless opinion on PPRuNe.