Rainboe....the two examples are exactly my point. They both stem from a miss managed situation. You should have spotted the fact that the thing would go into Alt - it's called mode awareness and SA....things which are very important when operating advanced glass. Unfortuanately rather than learning these important skills people would rather just screw up the automation and then click it all out.
Having said that in both cases a step down in automation level works ....you don't want ALT capture....well you can change the Alt sel and you have path or VS...if you had enough SA to see it coming. As for the LOC example ....it's the same argument as the LNAV example - take heading!
...and I think you'll find that when it comes to flying servicable jets into the ground it's statistically the experienced PIC who is flying at the time. Also having trained a large number of people moving from a 1960s explosion in a dial factory to state of the art EFIS flight deck, I would take issue with your assertion that the young wizz kids are less safe..quite the opposite in fact.
This is all thread drift of course....but I wonder if a lack of mode awareness and poor SA were contributing factors in this accident ... and how much was this emphasised in the crews training...