I'm no aeronautical engineer, but is it perhaps possible that both theories - in-flight breakup and intact impact with the water - are partly true? Would it be possible for the aircraft to lose the VS and perhaps the HS and some control surfaces due to overspeed or excessive control inputs, and then enter some kind of stall or spin and impact the water in the manner suggested by the report (high vertical speed, but not so high as to completely disintegrate everything)? Or would losing the VS at altitude inevitably lead to an in-flight breakup?
I still find it hard to see why we're relying on Black Boxes. Given the amount of data being sent to 'Company', I can't help feeling that total monitoring could be done via satellite these days. While in America, I spend ages chatting to people on Skype. I share this with 20+ million people - many enjoying modest video. If this can be done as a give-away, surely something as important as crew well-being and aircraft integrity could be transmitted in real-time.
The ACARS messages are actually extremely small in terms of data transmitted. This issue has been discussed elsewhere on this thread and the original AF447 thread. It boils down to this: with the existing infrastructure, it is not feasible to transmit the amount of data necessary to make a continuous recording of the flight parameters recorded by the FDR, still less to stream the multiple audio tracks from the CVR. It is not so much a matter of installing new technology into the airplanes, but of how to transmit the data, which would perhaps require new satellites and other very expensive bits of infrastructure.
Plus, pilots may object to the possibility of being micromanaged from the ground even as they fly, if all that data is being sent in real time to the home office.