which of course are fully functioning throttles, cleverly enhanced with modern technology, and are entirely instinctive to use manually or automatically
Would you buy a used car from this person?
"Entirely instinctive..." I'm trialling website software at the moment and terms very similar to this are used to describe the programs (more than one). It's nonsense. If you hardly ever use the software (or throttles) then they are not "instinctive", nor are you likely to be confident enough to disengage the gimmicks and revert to basic, or indeed even think about doing so.
I haven't read the whole report yet but I suspect that the issue was more basic than violating the mighty Airbus Golden Rules. If the GPWS was going off, the crew never got to step 1.