Weather or....
With all due respect, Wally, all of us, as pilots and SLF's, have flown thru bad weather. Sometimes we didn't have a choice due to the mission, and I feel most of us avoided obvious bad weather.
Over the past 50 years we learned a lot about weather effects that extend miles and miles from the obvious CB towering cumulus. We learned about mountain waves and CAT and rotor clouds. What a wonderful world it would be to have CAVU every day. Well, I personally like those fair weather cumulus, heh heh. Kinda adds "ambience" to the experience.
There is no doubt that "weather" will play some role in the tragedy. However, the biggest role will be freezing up the air data probes for a system that depends upon them for many functions and "nice to have" features of the jet.
It is interesting to note that several other jets flew thru the same general area and their pitot-static systems didn't go "tits up".
The BEA reports do not indicate severe flight conditions that we pilots would be concerned with. Instead, we have a loss of air data to a sophisticated system, and the subsequent warnings and change of "laws" seem to have played a large role in the pilot reactions.
In short, Wally, I ain't gonna blame flying near some storms over the ocean, or efforts by the crew to "ease the pain" going thru a line of them. In my experience, the storms over the Pacific were nothing compared to the ones over Kansas. I even re-fueled behind a KC-135 a few times in the middle of some of those suckers and it was nothing I would have attempted over Topeka in the summertime.