ATC Watcher,
Very informative post.
Re TCAS, the Japan DC10/B747 incident from January 2001 springs to mind, where the crew of the B747 (I think) decided to ignore the RA and do it visually instead. Turned out it wasn't really the right decision, since it resulted in a very close encounter (10m, I repeat: 10m seperation!).
One of the recommendations of the japanese investigators was for ICAO to clarify the use of TCAS.
As we know, nothing happened in that respect until July 1st 2002...