Sorry about what you read as sarcasm there, PJ2. It is just that, as you are no doubt aware, a student pilot should be taught about a lot more than just keeping the airspeed above a certain critical value so that one really cannot say that "Airspeed is Everything," and leave it at that.
Seriously, you could tell some unfortunate that and have him thinking he's in good shape in his little Cessna with 90 knots on the ASI but -1500 fpm on the VSI. If he survived that one his come-back would be, "But you told me that Airspeed is Everything!" when you would then have to try to over-ride the Rule of Primacy, when whatever you had told him first would be very firmly believed. Good luck with that!
I have had people getting their knickers in a twist when I have got all the way down to Vref on an approach, when they want to see Vref +10 or whatever they have been told is the minimum safe value carried all the way to the 50-foot point. There, in my opinion, they are placing far too much emphasis on speed alone, ignoring many other things of equal import, plus forgetting that Vref already has a 30% speed margin above stall built into it, 30% that you will have to get rid of before the airplane stops flying, usually in ground effect.
Speed awareness seems to have played an obvious role in this accident, given that we have been told the accident crew got to 80 knots there. I really do look forward to learning how this happened, when whatever the cause is given as must be taken as "plausible" even if it's also "improbable, incredible, unbelievable" or whatever else we loosely call something very, very surprising.
Who would ever have guessed that an FO would raise the flaps unbidden as the response to a stall, yet that is exactly what happened in that Colgan Buffalo accident. It is, yes, very "implausible" that any pilot would do that so that we have to try and figure out "Why?" if that is possible.
As pilots there's always a defense mechanism that comes into play when there is an accident. We want to dismiss the accident crew as exceptional, as if to say that whatever happened to them will not happen to us. "They weren't watching what they were doing!" when we, of course, always do. Yeah, except when we don't, and if there are a few other factors in play then we too might have an accident. So I think we have to wait for the report to read it carefully, put ourselves in the shoes of the dead crew and think our way through what went on there. Or we can just go into self-defensive Sky God mode, assume we could never make such an implausible mistake and carry on as we are.
One of the most Sky Godly of us all, one who was always ready to dance on the corpses of other accident pilots, made a deadly mistake of his own one day. When I heard about it (when I knew him, the airplane and the environment that killed him) I thought to myself that if he'd been a bit more open to the idea that he too could make some obvious screw-up then he and his three passengers might still be with us.