It does seem to me surprising that the (deserved) medal has been handed out before the AAIB accident report is released.
Indeed.
Just imagine that at the end of the day the report pinpoints some embarrassing error by the crew (unlikely at this point I would agree)...
And frankly I'm not sure they deserve such high marks for doing their job as expected. As far as I can tell neither pilots nor flight crew did anything outside their normal attribution. That's absolutely fine but does it really deserve all this ? Should we make heroes and award medals to competent professionals ?! Quite frankly given the timing of the event the biggest factor of all was sheer luck.