All airliners have good and "not quite so good" features. All airlines have good and "not quite so good" SOP's.
If you read the CVR transcript you will not find one FMA call, not one ECAM caution read out loud when failures were introduced.
I believe that if "FLIGHT CONTROLS DIRECT LAW" and "USE MANUAL PITCH TRIM" had been spoken in that cockpit on that day they would almost certainly have survived.
That is the way Airbus expect their aircraft to be operated in a malfunction situation.