It seems to me the topic of litigation is being driven by the lawyers, not the passengers, so some lawyer-bashing is in order.
In the good old days in Britain, the pax would all have been give a hot cuppa and a fancy biscuit from a mobile tea truck and every one would have been happy
Yes and no. Personally I love the stiff upper lip, and deploy it through choice. But the good old days? Hmm, when we fed nerve gas to volunteers at Porton Down and hushed it up, or when children killed themselves every day in unsafe playgrounds and we did nothing about it? For sure, Britain needed a wake up call with our 'stiff upper lip'. We should remember this when we go off venting about "PC" nonsense.
Everything suggests to me that the flight deck did a great job, but as far as I can see, negligence has not yet been excluded. Maybe we should be a bit more circumspect here until the truth finally emerges. I agree broadly speaking that in daily life some discomfort is to be taken on the chin, but I don't believe surviving a plane crash is necessarily trivial.