Well if there is a fire there is smoke and you need drills to deal with it.
We do have drills to deal with it. However, the fire drill (checklist) & the smoke removal checklist are seperate, although inter-connected in some ways. The problem becomes - do you deal with the fire checklist first & then the smoke checklist or do you deal with the smoke first?
Logic would dictate that you put the fire out & then deal with any smoke. The problem arises when the smoke becomes a serious issue before you have finished dealing with the fire! Do you then stop the fire checklist half way through to deal with the smoke or persevere with the fire? If you stop the fire checklist to deal with the smoke, the fire may be generating too much smoke for the smoke removal procedure to deal with & the situation would then be getting rapidly out of control.
You just dismiss the next accident as a surprise
That is not what I was talking about & generally is not the case. Aviation is quite complex & some scenarios just weren't considered or were considered highly unlikely. Systems are so complex & interconnected on modern airliners that unintended consequences can sometimes occur.
I don't know what the B744F systems are like - I haven't flown it. I don't know what Boeing considered & failed to consider (if anything) when designing the aircraft, as I wasn't there. But it is possible that so much effort was put into fire suppression that the effect on keeping smoke out of the cockpit was overlooked, or considered not relevant as it was thought that putting the fire out would solve the problem.
Some checklists are quite complicated & it is easy to make an error in the heat of the moment. It's bad enough in the simulator, but try to imagine what it would be like the circumstances of an actual fire with the threat to your well being. Perhaps an error was made. We'll know in due course.
I don't know much about fires either, but I do know that they can be very complex beasts & with the large variety of goods carried these days on freighter aircraft, perhaps not everything is known. I also know that companies trying to get their goods to market quickly have been, & continue to be, a little loose with their application of dangerous goods legislation.
Rest assured that most of the industry personel at the coal face are doing their level best to get it right & don't just dismiss accidents as a 'surprise', as you put it. Accidents, even those with no loss of life, are quite distressing to us in the industry. That is why we dissect them in every way possible in order to learn.
As far as we have come in this industry, there is still much that is not known & more than a few latent failures just waiting to strike.