the critical SE actions are to establish best glide
That's an old one but I wonder where it comes from.
Minimum sink is usually just a few knots above the stall burble. Yes, it will give you more time. Does it make sense to cruise through the undercast at minimum sink? I don't think so. Partly because you don't know when you are going to find the ground. When you are about to find it, you need some airspeed to trade off and arrest the descent rate. Even us glider pilots, who spend a lot of time thermaling at minimum sink, don't fly it to the ground. In the pattern we speed up to the best L/D or maybe above. Not because we care about our L/D performance at that point, in fact we are screwing it all up by extending some portion of our spoilers. But we need the energy, the airspeed so we can arrest the descent rate and make a good landing.
I had often argued against the single-minded 'go to best glide speed after an engine failure' training after I got my glider rating. Like IO540 says, those speeds are dependent upon wind. They are also dependent upon weight. But as I think about it, trimming for best glide does provide some safety against the stall at the bottom. If you end up in a bad spot it is better to crash well, with minimum descent rate and speed, rather than stall and drop it in.
Sure, if you are high and trim up for minimum sink speed, you have more time to think and troubleshoot. Probably not a lot more time. And, will you remember at the bottom to speed up again to have that airspeed for the flare? I might, after all that's what I do in gliders. But would the average Joe, as he ended up close to the ground, think to push the nose over and get the speed back up as the ground was rising to smite him? It is counter intuative, especially in a genuine emergency situation.
Back to the thread, there is one other psychological benefit of declaring a pan in this scenario, or at least telling air traffic control about it. When you admit a problem to the controllers, then you have admitted it to yourself. I wonder if the instructor from my old flight school hadn't admitted to himself there was a problem, or rather he convinced himself that the problem had gone away. If he was still thinking 'problem' maybe he would have made some different decisions.
-- IFMU