pattern_is_full;
Best evidence rules.
I'm not convinced there is any such thing as "best" evidence, yet - that's my main point. I concur with all your points but that doesn't yield an accurate position - it only surmises.
The point regarding the routing is minor but the claim of the Vazquez preso for example, is that the route depicted IS the route taken and it's not necessarily so. He himself cautions that all positions after INTOL are "extrapolations". Videos and animations are very powerful tools these days but can be quite incorrect depending on a number of factors. The Vazquez animation is very good as is his analysis and may turn out to be highly useful if not accurate but we should not permit ourselves to assume that such is the case at present, at least not without supporting data. We do not know where whatever-happened-to-the-aircraft, happened. The unreliability increases with time after the last position report of course, but you knew that... ;-)
In the end we may not have the luxury of much data and will have to draw conclusions based solely upon what we are seeing today. I truly hope that that does not turn out to be the case.
Normally (over land or closer to land), we would have a wealth of other information such as radar/transponder plots and ADS positions (in areas so equipped). We would have ATC records and we have always had an accident site.
The evidence (this, the ACARS and anything else), is so thin that it is important to verify all of what is available as strongly as possible.
That's all...I realize and understand the kind of informal rule-making regarding evidence that's going on at present. In the end it may be all or partially correct but at the moment no one can say. At the same time many here and elsewhere are drawing conclusions anyway. Go figure.
With such little evidence, the extreme desire to determine what happened by a number of "interested" parties carries, I think, a certain risk, the first of which among many, is hind-sight bias.