@Gibon2
Good question, I've seen raised elsewhere too (more below)
@Svarin
Good points, especially the piloting changes - I don't think any of the a/c designers, A or B or other, intended the result of improving the plane/automatics side of pilot+plane to be that the airlines then dumb down the pilot side to compensate
I would venture to add:
Unique circumstances
is possible - even after all those years. BA038 fell out of the sky after almost the same length of exemplary 777 service. The design failing blamed
has been there from the start - it just took that long to show up. The investigation went through probably millions of hours (175k flights) of past 777 flight data and found that the BA038 flight
was unique. No other flight in all that time went through the same environmental conditions.
Selective reporting is also possible - maybe the pitot events have always been happening but not reported. Usually the events last only seconds and cause few or no problems. After one or two incidents raise the profile (before 447), maybe you start to get more events acutally reported.
After BA038 I think there were some other brief transient rollbacks reported (at altitude where didn't cause a problem) that may well be the same cause, but were just never reported before.