Bear, I don't have enough info to answer your "?" about what's mounted wear with any confidence. Someone who flies or fixes the A330 might.
As to this:
Just a few. For one, if, instead of commanding PITCH, the elevators were trimming the THS.
How is that possible?
Only if the THS had lost integrity with the mount, specifically the jackscrew.
Had this occurred, the THS elevator system would perform as an all flying tail, a stabilator.
bear, I am confused as to what you are saying. If you move the elevator, you command pitch to one degree or another. What appears to happen, unless in direct law or manual control, is that initial pitch controls are manifested in elevator movement, which is followed up by trim to the THS to put the loads in equilibrium for the new state. An elevator movement up or down will change the shape of the combined airfoil (THS/elevator) any time you do it. Under normal operations, the THS will naturally lag behind the elevator input for any control position change.
Using the trim wheel short circuits that. I understand based on a few posters here having described such an event, that it makes the control via trim wheel less "smooth" for the pilot flying compared to what he is used to.
To suggest that the elevators only trim the THS seems to me a desicription of how the combined system (elevator and THS) does not work. That may be my fault in part, as some pages back I raised the ideas of primary and secondary flight controls, and trim functions. (Maybe at Tech Log thread)
From the block diagram, the change induced by elevator control informs the system of a need, or not, to adjust THS trim to better position that flight control surface for best AoA for desired performance.
If anything got stuck, or was operating in reduced authority, there may or may not have been an audit trail ... but given how much info IS provided to the system via various wires and circuits, I'd be more inclined to believe that a jackscrew failure (or analogous THS positioning machine failure) would trigger either an alert or an ACARS message ... which to date BEA have not released as being the case.
Whatever remains of the tail flight control surface hardware after the slow descent to the depths would be nice to have examined, if only to consider the null hypothesis as part of the process of elimination.
Forensic analysis may be imperfect for a part collecting various deep ocean residue for a couple of years, but a good estimation could be made.