Having spent years watching crews in the sim sorting out problems and noting the time it has taken them, three and a half minutes is not a lot.
It depends on how you look at it. Four minutes is a lot of time for two pilots to be
startled or
surprised. It's not a lot of time for pilots who are
confused. I think it's important to be quite clear and specific in regard to the terminology used.
In any event, I think the time issue is a red herring. What the flight crew should be judged upon is not the length of time they had but
how they utilized the time they did have. Was their behavior in accordance with their training? Was it up to professional standards? The fact that there was only four minutes before the plane crashed was not a predetermined parameter set in some sim session; those four minutes were a function of the flight crew's inability to prevent and then recover from a stall.