Ok. But how far do you take it? This design is now almost 20 years old. It has been used millions of times without incident. There are now 4 instances of "mishandling" leading to accidents. Is it reasonable to now re-design what is actually a very safe system?
if investigation did show that this specific design decision did not actually increase security but has contributed to catastrophic accidents like this one? Yes, absolutely.
I do, however, not know what the original decision was. Was it to spare the cost and weight of the TL actuators? Not very probable, but maybe. Was it in the hope to make the cockpit more ergonomical? Then it might have the be thought over.
Your analogy to the car brand where you only touch gas/brake when leaving the driveway is not representative here. There is NO DIFFERENCE in the way you land a Boeing or an Airbus. Upon landing, at approx 20 feet, reduce thrust to idle. Period. No difference.
yes, I know it was irrelevant. Any car analogy is irrelevant. Cars are by far less complex than any airplane.
If you drive a manual car what happens when you put your foot on the clutch but leave it on the gas pedal - commanded "thrust". When you learn to drive what is one of the fundamental things you are taught........ clutch down - gas off..........
And I'll be the first to say that I've already managed to kill off the engine by letting go the cluch with one foot on the brakes. I've scared everybody in the car by firmly stepping onto the clutch pedal, only that it was the brake pedal as I was driving an automatic car. It doesn't happen every day, but it has happened.
We all make mistakes and it should be the top design rules/goals of any complex system to #1 prevent error whereever possible, #2 tolerate single errors where #1 is impossible and #3 fail gracefully if #1 and #2 are impossible.
In this case, the design change could be that a "manual brakes applied" overrides the "one TLA >22.5°" ground spoilers/autobrakes inhibition and maybe at the same time idles the engine, while I'm not too sure about that.
pj