Having read the inconvenient truth, Red 5, and payed close attention to the litany of tragic events in recent decades, I am bound to agree with the general consensus of opinion that the MoD has a substantial case to answer, and however unlikely it is that it ever will, it cannot credibly be allowed to continue to be judge, jury and executioner when it comes to investigating "accidents".
That said, to blame everything on the "bogey man" of the faceless MoD also falls well wide of being the whole the truth, and an open minded observer would find it hard to avoid a conclusion that a dismal safety culture in the RAF was a major contributory factor in every incident.
All of that said, I continue to find myself drawn back to this incident, and what seems to me to be a major point of difference from the others, and that is the question of the Release to Service. In most instances, armed with the full benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see a rolling aggregation of causal factors, holes in the cheese, call them what you will, fatefully coming together to produce the tragic outcome. A series of acts and omissions, some deliberate, some negligent, but pretty much invariably contributed by well intentioned participants who did not for a moment think that their actions could lead to disaster.
The RTS on the other hand seems very different. It would appear that "the system" was working, in that it had identified several major issues with the aircraft, of such combined severity that it could not be test flown, let alone released to service. And yet in a hop, skip, and a jump it found its way onto the flightline, via the most bizarre construct of a newly invented type of RTS, where although the paperwork suggested the aircraft could be put into operation, the "small print" actually precluded its being flown. Why did the individual officer elect to do this? However embarassing and inconvenient (and expensive) the ongoing problems with the Mk2s were, they were not of his making. They were patently nontrivial and a clear risk to life. Why devise a new type of RTS, which, whilst providing a fig leaf to cover his own decision, he knew would more than likely not be properly understood and would not stop the aircraft being put into use? How could the signature of one man take precedence over the considerable body of contradictory evidence not to mention knowledge of many (dozens?) of colleagues, some of them senior to him? Where were the checks and balances? What was his motivation; was this one of the performance objectives he had been set by his superiors? Was he just overly ambitious for his own career ends, or did he just happen to be the cog in a much larger wheel which wanted / needed the aircraft in service at any cost?
IMHO, the root cause of this tragedy lies in the background to the RTS decision, and it is this which needs further investigation. That it was this particular aircraft which crashed, on this particular flight is simply the hand of fate.