Reading that report, I was amazed not to find the sidestick use as a contributing factor in that very serious incident ... !??
I'm not. Because:
1) on the day of Johannesburg incident, and every day since it, FBW Airbuses, from 318 to 346, made a couple of thousands of normal rotations and lift-offs. If the problem was sidestick related, one would expect at least some of take-offs to end up like J'burg one. Well, they didn't.
2) insufficient rotation for lift-off can be also easily achieved with yoke; all you have to do is pull-but-not-quite-enough. Even PA-28 is capable of performing it.
Problem was that capt, as PF of the flight, used undocumented and inapropriate procedure for rotating the A343 without even suspecting it was wrong. Trainning fault, I guess.
On aircraft with moving throttles the switching off of AT is far less frequent than on Airbus. Why? Because you still have full authority over the thrust. You can hold back, increase, decrease as required, retaining ALL the fancy AT protections. This is especially handy in strong and gusty wind conditions. With Airbus, if the performance of the AT is not as desired, the AOM recommends to switch it off. Now this is not dangerous, but it takes away some protections, leaving basically only Alpha Prot.
Switching off the autothrust
does not take away
any of the protections. Holding AT disconect for 15 seconds disables ATHR for the rest of the flight and disables alpha floor only.
As English is not my native language, would you please confirm if I understood you correctly that you advocate fiddling with throttle levers while keeping the autothrottle on. Thank you.