Your first point. It may well have been a “rational choice”, but there is no evidence it is the one the Russians took, so you are only confusing matters by calling it “crucial”.
Your second point. If the instructor searched in vain, it does not mean he or the crew were confused, especially as they did not discuss it. It is entirely possible the instructor searched, found nothing, and concluded there was only one plane. However, they did debate whether to follow TCAS or ATC.
You are introducing the possibility of confusion by fastening on a speculative case rather than the actual, accepted case.
Your third point in fact supports my own. Your citation from the specs is undoubtedly correct, but banal. No TCAS design could possibly account for a factor completely extraneous to it, e.g. a controller getting on the horn and telling the crew to do the opposite of the TCAS instruction. It was the responsibility of the managers and regulators of air traffic control generally to demarcate the respective responsibilities of the controller and TCAS in all situations, and they failed to do that unambiguously.
If you say no “three-way” risk analysis has been performed then I would have to take your word for it, and maybe agree that it should be done if it hasn’t yet. I somehow doubt, however, that the risks here are not understood and have been ignored.
As for your final point about me possibly being aware of other midair collisions, you being only aware of one, I spoke of incidents only. The ACAS II bulletins have published case studies of TCAS encounters for several years.
One example was a 146 pilot who ignored his TCAS RA because the high angle of attack of the 747 he had visually acquired fooled him into believing it was climbing, when it was in fact descending. The result was a serious loss of separation. Same thing happened with the JAL 747 and the JAL DC10 over Japan when a pilot thought his visual information was superior to the TCAS RA. They missed by 10 metres.
I know that Eurocontrol carried out a large study of incidents involving non-compliance with TCAS and found other worrying incidents after Ueberlingen but they did not publish them because the study was done in co-operation with one particular airline under conditions of confidentiality (understandably).
I simply suggest that there have been rare cases where pilots thought they knew better than TCAS, and your remarks could encourage that tendency.
And you, incidentally, will acquire lots more credit if you drop the sarcasm.