First off, THANK YOU DUCK!
This thread went seriously south at post #5.
They flew into a thunderstorm. The A330-203 was at max cruise altitude and at faster than normal mach (because of the high/heavy choice). Mach .82 and encountering moderate turbulence and most likely warming temps when they got a vertical gust of XX knots. Who knows, who cares. Iced pitots? Who knows, who cares, same result. The ADIRU's are programmed to 'fail' with a loss or gain of 60 knots, because that is thought to be impossible. They were entering an area of increasingly worse/impossible conditions for their planned performance prior to encountering/stumbling into a buildup.
The plane stalled. The engine/s probably flamed out/overtemped/burped because the inlet air also vectored off of normal due to the vertical gust. If only one was producing thrust, the plane may have even flatly spun, but it did so in a stalled condition. 208 metric tonnes falling from FL350 after a stall will look the same as a rock. They remained stalled all the way down. Vertical fin and pieces of a horizontal stab were found floating. How much tail remained on the way down? Who knows, not enough, obviously. None of this surprises me. The ACARS messages are nice to have, but fact is, they would be expected in this scenario.
I have flown this EXACT route several hundred times in 37 years, and no prudent aviator is going to ignore the weather in this region.
Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who has ever penetrated an active thunderstorm (for whatever reason) will do whatever it takes to never do it again.
Provided they survive their first encounter.
The Old/Bold rule.
Another small tidbit. Within an hour of the impact 7 other flights went within 100 miles of AF447 that night, and every night since, and not a single one of them has made CNN.
Sorry, I think Occams' Razor applies here.