Forgive me for jumping in, but there's been so much BS on this thread.
First, in doing test flights whether they are experimental test flights, maintenance check flights or research flights the mantra is "Plan the flight and fly the plan." I've been engaged in flight test for thirty-plus years and may have been tempted to deviate from the flight card (or told to), I've always resisted, which many explain why I'm still around. I'm not any better than the others, just more methodical (and more wary of what can go wrong).
I can not imagine doing this test essentially in the traffic pattern. If you missed the point at a safe altitude, you need to go back to the safe altitude and conduct the test. And don't do things on the fly (no pun intended.)
If you're doing a test such as this, where the alpha-protection logic should engage at XXX knots, and it doesn't by XXX-2 knots, I'd take the airplane back and figure out what happened on the ground.
I've seen some negative comments about voting out one alpha probe, but then allowing it to trigger stall warning. Isn't this the conservative thing to do? I don't have any problem with this at all.
As far as decluttering the mode annunciations during the recovery, I feel partly guilty. In some of my studies, I recommended doing just this to clean up the PFD when a unusual attitude recovery was to be made. After the A-330 accident during flight test in Toulouse, I realized the error and no longer recommend decluttering essential information. This means, however, we need to move this off the PFD and have the annunciations adjacent to but not on the PFD.
Sorry about the rant.
Goldfish