The Australian Transportation Safety Board Preliminary Report contains two items which have so far not been commented on.
First, it seems that the cabin crew were unable to talk to the flight deck:
"The customer service manager (CSM) reported attempting to contact the flight crew, including through the use of the EMERGENCY contact selection on the cabin interphone system, which activated the flight deck warning horn. However, that selection had no associated ECAM message and the flight crew stated that they associated the emergency contact warning horn with the continuously-sounding warnings from the ECAM system and so cancelled the horn."
The pilots were too busy to answer the phone. There was no 'unable' about it....they had other things to do.
It therefore seems that, assuming the CSM has no way of actually entering the cockpit in these strengthened door days, there was no way for the cabin crew to inform the flight deck about any possible injuries to passengers from engine debris.
Sure there is.....
Therefore there is unfortunately no recording of the flight crew's handling of this incident, a recording which would have proved invaluable for future cockpit crew training. The period before over-writing on the CVR is stupidly short.
All that's needed to show how the crew handled the incident is recorded on the DFDR and QAR. All that they don't have is the words, and the background sounds. And whilst they may be of some use, they really come into their own when you don't have a crew to talk to, or aircraft to look at. The contents of a CVR would not be released under Australian law, so they would not be available for 'training'.
But, you are right in that 2 hours does seem short in this age of cheap chips.