Grizzled,
A330 fleet has logged 18.000.000 flight hours since its entry into service back in 1993 with only two hull losses (AF447 and the Afriqiyah one in Tripoli) with casualties.
Of course, it will have been better for all the poor souls on board those two flights that they did not occur.
Anyway, with such figures, we can surmise that this particular A/C type is basically safe.
We all know in this business that today accidents involve more and more human factors, including of course the interactions between pilots (one type of culture) and systems designed by engineers (one other and very different type of culture).
Therefore, it seems logical to come back (as other posters have done already) to the behaviour of the pilots during this flight.
Even if I am not as radical as you regarding this behaviour (I think they were alert due to the forthcoming crossing of the ITCZ), since some weeks after the accident, I have been musing over the following lines :
- either the pilots took the wrong decisions / actions as they were misled by corrupted data / information coming from the (in)famous iced pitots,
- or the pilots were overwhelmed by the volume of information to be dealt with (not lucky enough to have five brains in the cockpit as in the QFA A380 last November) and were not able to take the good decisions / actions on time.
Please bear in mind that none of these possibilities is from my point of view an attack on the professionalism / competencies of the two pilots in the cockpit (whether the Captain was there or not).
And that's why I am much more interested in the CVR than in the DFDR ... hoping anyhow that both will be found and decoded.