After rotation the handling pilot is flying by reference to instruments even having reduced the AoA I doubt looking out the window would have been much help but that is only my opinion.
A question - if you're at 35ft, flying by instruments, is the PNF looking out of the window for obstacles? I appreciate that anything but a straight line is going to be problematic at that altitude. Obviously the problem manifested itself when there was still runway in front, but there wouldn't have been much time to react, get the engines spooled up and gain a bit more altitude. (I know it's several seconds from idle to decent power, what is it from typical flex t/o power to TOGA?)