"slats11, I suspected that this problem was known and a suitable bludgeon was needed to get the airlines to switch rapidly. I noticed the pilots unions got on the BEA, AirBus, and the airlines pretty quickly, too. So they took advantage of a handy crisis to get the job done. (God that sounds slimy.) And, indeed, it probably did need doing."
It is not beyond the realms of possibility that given the acars messages and any other data that was gathered,that Airbus did not input all the data into a 300 flight simulator in TLS and have known exactly what happened for a very long time.
I have seen flight the engineers doing just this sort of work when my airline used to use TLS for recurrent simulator checks.
Recovering the recorders will simply prove their assumptions and provide a reason as to why adverse weather was penetrated by this crew.