it's always surprising to me
how easily the professional pilot community will go along with pointing fingers at a fellow pilot who died in an accident.
To make this clear: I'm merely a recreational flyer, can't offer much more than an educated outside view.
However: an accident report will usually list causes and contributing factors for what happened and how the event developed.
We don't have the full data, what we have are the original messages from 2yrs ago and what we hear from the investigation now.
I dare draw one conclusion from what I know: the captain not being in the left seat is clearly not the cause for the accident. It may turn out to be a contributing factor if it can be shown that the two guys flying the aircraft at the time of the event were not capable to handle the situation, but then: who sais the captain would have been able to?
It's good news for anybody who wants to point away from themselves and it sounds scary enough to the public to be picked up by the media en masse, but it clearly is no explanation for the death of all those people.
All of you who wrote that they would have been in the cockpit with this weather forecast: good for you! It doesn't guarantee that you would have fared any better than the two chaps who were, in fact, in their seats.
This discussion is clouding the search for the real reason. The airplane didn't stall because there was no four-striped jacket in the cockpit, there was another root cause and that's what we need to know.
Let's stop talking about possible contributing factors and focus on cause.