Do you people not get that the Autothrottle and Autopilot are two independent systems?
The autothrottle will go from SPEED mode into RETARD at 27ft RA. It doesn't matter if you are flying manual or on the autopilot.
The Majorproblem is that 3 pilots failed to notice the thrust not being increased when the commanded speed was reached. There must have been a very very big green speed trend arrow pointing down. Subsequently as airspeed decreased below the commanded speed they must have noticed the following, increasingly higher pitch attitude, less noise (wind and thrust), speed entering yellow band on speed tape, speed entering red band, stick shaker! The initial indications should have led to disconnecting of the autothrottle, the later indications to a go-around.
Although a system fault caused the thrust to come back, simply standing up the thrust levers at Vref (without disconnecting the autothrust) and holding it there with muscle power would have prevented this. The lever position commands the thrust, so overriding the autothrottle is possible. Although you will feel pressure from the system trying to close the levers in RETARD mode. In a later stage a go-around (TOGA press) would have solved it.
They didn't, 3 pilots missed everything until they were at 400ft with a stickshaker. The question is why?
As far as i'm concerened there is nothing wrong with the design philosophy, this was a lack of basic flying combined with too much faith in the automatics!
So far any one that says flying raw data manually flown approaches in IMC is dangerous. Relying on automatics is equally dangerous, and when you need to takeover you might lack the skills to fly it out.