Potential
Many thanks for your post - informative, factual and written from a professional perspective, one of the best on this site for sure.
So having read your post it leaves me with the one key question:
Furthermore there was never an actual evacuation command given by the crew, as I was moving towards the exit to try to inflate the slide, many people were still sitting in their seats with their seatbelts on.
Which door was opened first and by whom? And was this the trigger for all the events that followed?