Am I alone in my disbelief at the apologists who are dreaming up idiotic excuses for this cretin?
No, probably not. Your disbelief might be a good hint that what you're not believing is perhaps not true..? I haven't heard anyone here finding his behavior excusable...
What has been spoken up against is the moral panic of "Oh-my-god-he-was-taking-drugs-what-a-bad-bad-person!!!", and to question whether even
without hindsight there was already enough
evidence to motivate grounding him.
I think, and hope, most PPL holders would prefer a system where a pilot is grounded
after investigation, not
pending investigation.
The main point emphasized by this accident (I won't call it a "lesson to be learned", since it is really nothing new), is to be very, very careful who one flies with. The risks involved with a particular "operation" (if that is a proper term for what this pilot was running...) can be many orders of magnitude higher or lower than what the over-all accident statistics seem to imply.