AFAIK, the Airbus still flys under the old mantra "power + attitude = performance".
Now I simply cannot believe that the pilots of this aircraft were a bunch of dopes, so there was some other major problem preventing their setting power and attitude to maintain a survivable speed.
So, what went wrong??? The info out there in the public domain suggests that they had valid attitiude, where were they mislead into a fatal series of errors? More importantly (to me) how can I recognise a similar chain of events setting up to hurt me???