I would imagine that the Captain of the BA flight, competent Airman that he clearly is, would be feeling somewhat embarrassed if he read the offensive and personal attacks made by some in trying to 'defend' him. Surely he has no need for friends like these! The nature of some replies to Jonc9 are so rude and illogical that an observer might reasonably come to the conclusion that the writers are only resorting to such abuse because they have lost the argument - if indeed there needs to be an argument at all.
That Captain made a number of decisions during that flight. The flight landed safely so his decisions were fundementally sound. Because we are pilots and professionals though, we accept that our decisions are bound to be analyzed over and over again by our peers. They will do this from the comfort of their armchairs and with no time constraints! There is nothing wrong with this - it is one of the reasons why flying has become so safe.
There are often no 'right' or 'wrong' decisions. Some are just, with hindsight, better than others. We go to great lengths in training to get people to understand this.
By all accounts that crew, on the day, behaved impeccably. Were all of the Captain's decisions the best options? With the benefit of hindsight possibly not, but that is no critisism and aviation safety has been improved by this event. For example, 747 pilots understand their fuel system better now than they did previously...
What to do after an engine surge (and after the engine has been shut down and secured) is an interesting debate. I have had a GE (CF6) surge and, on engineering inspection it was found that the engine was considerably damaged. Naturally, we did not know the extent of the damage until after landing... There are though, ex RR Conway operators for whom an engine surge was a regular event! Nowadays though, these happenings are so rare that, having shut the engine down, I would probably acknowledge the possibility of damage and remain close to suitable and commercial alternates. For that reason, my 'armchair' course of action would have been to land at a BA destination somewhere on the east coast, hopefully without the need to dump some of the world's precious fuel. I think there are lots of us out here who would have made such a decision - we are not so vociferous on PPrune but the personal attack on Jonc9 is ridiculous and demeaning to the profession.
It is unfortunate that BA's standards have been questioned. I know that BA have the highest standards (I would say that though, I was a Training Captain with them). There are many very dodgy operators on both sides of the pond let alone elsewhere in the world who would never stand up to even superficial investigation. Such an incident would probably never have been reported.
BS