PBL, this is from your post:
"You think people have been going out doing stalls in Airbuses to see what happens?
The aerodynamic characteristics of a modern commercial jet are determined in wind tunnels, mostly for certification purposes. The wind tunnel work determines how the wing behaves, not the whole airplane. It determines at what point lift drops off sharply, and so forth. There is a lot of data, but there is by no means everything. The point of "stall" is not necessarily defined as being where the lift drops off sharply; it is more often defined by a degree of buffet (I refer to the regs).
"Sim tests" cannot help anyone with stalls. Simulators are only veridical at most up to the point of defined-stall (which may be at lower AoA than lift-break). So anything you can do in a sim is an approach-to-stall procedure."
Yes indeed, Airbus in this case thought it was worthwhile for writing the FOT to conduct additional many stall tests on the aircraft and compare them to simulator behavior, not only rely on certification data. At the same time it has all the data required for its operators to simulate stall recovery in the simulator, this will not be sim tests as you state it but training on stall recovery.