As an ex-B737 pilot I am still amazed at the lack of debate about the simple fact that as soon as the warning horn went off, no one looked at the gauges next to the pressurisation panel, namely the cabin rate of climb indicator and more importantly, the cabin altitude indicator. Whist this crew may have confused the warning horn for the configuration warning, they and every other B737 pilot n the world will have learnt AND been examined at some stage on the fact that the cabin altitude warning also uses the same horn.
Besides the fact that they didn't spot the misset pressurisation controller several times is crucial. It matters not one iota that the engineer may not have set it back to Auto after the maintenance. I defy one PROFESSIONAL pilot on here to write on here that they have ever received an aircraft back from maintenance without something not back in the right position. It is a known fact that if we have been informed that maintenance have been fixing the aircraft then we do our pre-flight checks extra carefully in order to spot anything that may not have been returned to its pre-flight position.
That aside, a warning whilst in the initial climb phase should warrant a stop in the climb if safety altitude is not a factor in order that everything can be assessed without the added worry of hypoxia or other high altitude complexities to interfere with fault finding. This crew simply did not do what they were supposedly trained to do. As the report concludes, they were the primary reason that this accident ever took place. There have been other incidences of crew mistakenly misidentifying the cabin altitude warning horn but at least one of the crew members on those flights had the fortunate ability to remember to look at the cabin altitude gauge and realise that the real reason for the warning horn was not a configuration warning.
In short, the crew were ultimately responsible and all this new hype about an electrical problem or some sort of conspiracy theory to hide other problems does not answer why the pilots of the accident flight didn't check their cabin altitude even if they had forgotten that the same warning horn was used for both config and cab alt. I'm sorry to have to say that these fellow pilots made fundamental mistakes and paid the ultimate price. All we can do is learn from their mistakes and hope we can apply the memory if and when it should ever happen to us.