But we have crashes like Indian 605 where in a perfect plane on a clear day, they fell into mode confusion on the approach and couldn’t bring themselves to just fly the airplane, instead trying to untangle the modes all the way into the crash. Or, Flash 604 where in IMC the AP failed to engage on departure, and instead of flying the plane they maintained a panicked and sustained effort to engage it, again all the way into the crash. Or, Asiana 214, with again a perfect plane on a perfect day where, unlike the other 2 examples and to their credit, they clicked the red button and decided to fly the airplane.
Vessbot I disagree on 2 of the three accidents you quoted. Indian airlines and Asiana both were visual approaches manually flown. There was no mode confusion because even to get confused you need to know what's going wrong. They were flying an approach without ever looking at the speed or ROD. The IAS in Indian case was 26kts below Vapp and in Asiana case was 31 kts below Vapp. They would have crashed even in a Dakota(actually more easily). The tragedy is both were under command check and not copilot release check.