I have been thinking about some different ways to gain insight into this moving/non-moving thrust lever debate, as well as the somewhat lesser "leave the TOGA option" debate.
My intuition is that with sufficiently-trained operators, nothing decides the issue definitively. However, I am looking for general reasons why this may be so.
There is at least one such phenomenon for the "leave the TOGA option" debate. It is associated with the name of John Buridan, who was rector of the Sorbonne in 1328 and 1340, but apparently he never said it (see Anthony Kenny, Medieval Philosophy, A New History of Western Philosophy, Vol. 2, Oxford U.P. 2005, p96). If you take an ass and place it between two equally attractive bales of hay, it will be unable to decide between them and (so the theory goes) starve to death. The argument can obviously be generalised to two unequal bales of hay: there is a point in between them at which the ass will inevitably be undecided.
There is a theoretical formulation of this for (mathematical) metric spaces, due to Lamport and Palais, from the 1970's. There is, for every binary (generalise: discrete) decision function on a sufficiently continuous decision space a point of undefinition: where there is no defined decision. Lamport wrote this up in a more digestible version for non-mathematicians in a paper on the Buridan Problem in the 1980's. Both may be found on his WWW site.
The original application was to digital arbiters. Say, flip-flops, or even bits. Electrical current comes in, in a suitably continuous fashion, and you want the thing to go to 0 or 1. Can't always happen, say Lamport and Palais. Yes, but the chances of it not happening are vanishingly small, say "practical" people. Turns out not to be so. Turns out that chip producers have to do some work to figure out the "metastable behavior" (the new word for this indecision region) of certain HW to try to minimise the indecision behavior. Indeed, the phenomenon was discovered independently at about the same time by that eminently practical man Charles Molnar, who built the first desktop computer. Neither Lamport nor Molnar could get their papers published ("can't happen" said the referees. So much for the worth of peer review).
So, after all these words, Point 1: the "Buridan" indecision phenomenon is established. Now for its application.
For every discrete decision problem one constructs from continuous input, there will be an indecision region. It doesn't matter whether we are talking hardware, software or wetware. For every wonderful array of hinting devices, interlocks, moving/non-moving thrust levers, and so on, there is going to be a region in which one's decision criteria for continue the landing/go around don't yield a clear-cut decision.
If you change the technology, you just change the indecision region, you don't eliminate the phenomenon. If you push the decision somewhere else (say, 10 seconds before TD), you don't eliminate the phenomenon. If you wiggle the thrust levers, or leave them still, you don't eliminate.. etc.
Can I put this in one phrase? The "Buridan" indecision phenomenon persists through all technologies and designs.
One name? The Metastability Principle. One Mnemonic? Buridan's ass or yours!
This has a number of corollaries. One is to pull the teeth of the argument "yes, but if they had only had blue thrust levers instead of pink ones, this accident wouldn't have happened". Maybe true, but if you make the change you have just put the problem somewhere else, where some other flight will discover it which wouldn't have if you had left them pink.
There are more obviously larger areas of indecision. See the accident to a Tower Air B747 on RTO from JFK, December 20 1995,
https://www.flightsafety.org/ap/ap_mar97.pdf
http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/A_Acc2.htm
in which forward thrust was also applied during the RTO.
I am tempted, but too lazy this morning, to try to apply the Metastability Principle to the moving/non-moving thrust lever argument. I had some inkling from memory that there were examples of mismatched thrust levers on landing even on moving-lever airplanes, but I was simply too lazy to look them up or get on the phone to those who know (thank you, Lemurian!)
PBL