This a bit of the bad habits pilots "learn" in the simulator and bring back to the line:
-We tend to rush things in the sim and any malfunction after take-off is a "come back and land" without much thinking involved.
In this scenario, time was never critical, time was never and issue, they could have gained some altitude, go over the water and hold somewhere, run all the abnormal checklist they needed, talk to operation, brief the cabin thoroughly, decide to dump or not to dump fuel and then land somewhere.
on top of that, I am always surprised why as professional we don't use the proper phraseology to declare an emergency and get everybody's attention.