From early days, we have seen the concept of lets blame the pilot, particularly if they cannot answer for themselves. In some cases the situation just like this one, can be part pilot error, but often there are other facts that come into play, and if it suits the operator they can be smoothed over.
Does appear that in this case the pilots made a severe error of judgement, but then the system of checks should have caught the situation, long before it became life threatening. In this case the operators of the aircraft, are sitting back in their offices confident that they have had justice done. However they are failing to understand that wall papering over the cracks does not fix the problem.
I am sure that on this forum, there are many who are thinking "there but for the grace of God go I". It will interesting to see what change of operating procedures Airbus will bring out to avoid this and other situations coming back to haunt.
As for the pilots, would have thought this incident would have made them better pilots and should not be a reason to put them on scrap heap. Certainly showed considerable skill in their handling of events after the scrape.
As an after thought, I wonder if the rest of the fleets bulkheads have been checked, if the story put around of regular over loading has merit, perhaps some of the damage was already there and was only compounded by the incident.
Regards
Col