3 Holer, if you as a professional pilot can’t see the clearly obvious breaches of policy, airmanship, and basic rules of IFR, you are yourself dangerous and should not be in command of any aircraft with anyone other than yourself onboard.
Please don’t ever fly my family anywhere, for fear that you think it’s ok to descend into essentially IMC around high mountains, and I dare say in clear breach of policy of your airline.
As for the “the airline advertised the low level flights”, that’s terrific. You’ve just shown yourself unable to command anything by the justification of “but my airline thinks it’s ok, so it must be ok”. I could ask my 5 year old if he’d jump off the cliff because his mates are, and even he’s smart enough to say no. That’s essentially the exact same analogy.
The findings of some judge or whatever he was, has zero sway over me at all in this situation. Was he an experienced accident investigator? Did he have considerable experience in aviation at all? I suspect the answers to both those questions are NO, so therefore his contribution towards any investigation is useless.
The Captain made a series of questionable decisions that even his crew were not happy with (it was even recorded on the CVR). There is no doubt that there were other very critical factors involved, but if he had’ve flown around at the MSA, he wouldn’t have hit the mountain would he?