AoA surely is valuable information, but if nose points 16 deg up and altitude is going down, one would assume figuring out that there's a !!!!!load of AoA doesn't really take a rocket scientist?
The more confused the crew, the more important it is that they have clear, unequivocal, easy to interpret information available. Their internal computers were no doubt overloaded trying to make sense of what they were seeing. They didn't figure it out in time.