As I said earlier in the thread, i'm not being critical as these guys had a matter of seconds to sort this out, but I was wondering from a pure interest point of view if there would be a logical reason to leave the automatics in, on a 777 in particular.
I suppose it's a question of alternatives. With the autopilot engaged, it will carry on down the LOC and GS, slowly losing speed; this is not necessarily a bad thing (as a temporary measure) and it frees up a bit of mental processing power to be used on something else. No need to try to explain what you're doing with the controls to the other pilots as they know how the AP will function in these circumstances.
If the first reaction to the problem is taking out the AP, what does the HP do? Lower the nose to point at the houses? Fly at what speed? At that point I think mental models would start diverging and the sight of an aiming point that is obviously a crash into buildings/roads would introduce unneeded fear/consternation into the scenario.
Another factor is that these guys had been woken up in another country some 15hrs before. I know from experience that I'm not the freshest flower in the bunch at the end of a long duty; all your skills/reaction times/thought processes are degraded and there is precious little you can do about it.