A few observations;
Its been done before. !!!! No kidding! Really? How many hundred times I wonder? (the go-around stunt was even acheived with moderate success by a prop plane, an Electra in Shannon with a crew of instructors as the perpetrators) Now that was an impressive feat.
The only planned pax transport jet ditching ever as far as I know was a DC9 in the Caribbean back in the 70s. I think the Hudson incident was the only other successful and deliberate jet ditching under control but was hardly premeditated. Ethiopian was a forced crash and hardly a success.
No need for spoilers, coefficient of friction. The crew would know the figures from a table in the manual I suppose? The landing distance required non normal config no gear (incidentally that is no "gear", not "gears") table perhaps? The coefficient of friction of metal on tarmac is not necessarily very high. When I tried it - no nosewheel only - the aircraft showed no discernable deceleration whatsoever. I'd suggest that in such an event you'd want to ensure you stop asap to minimise risk of a high speed runway departure or overrun, so unless the checklist says no spoilers or they are inop I'd have thought them very useful.
Surprise that the nose did not touch. Just think where the main gear is relative to the nacelles. Of course it didn't, it couldn't. Move pax to the back? OMG! Do they do that in flightsim I wonder?
Surprise that this didn't end in disaster. Why? The ring-frame in the nacelles are designed to cope with the loads. The rear fuselage is just tin so unless there is major disruption of the structure the danger of a significant fire is minimal.
Speculation about return/continue transatlantic. If we don't know what the malfunction/s were or when they occurred it's an empty exercise isn't it? The crew made a professional judgement. Leave it be until the report is published.
Heroism? Bolleaux. Utter bolleaux. It had to be done, there was no option, it was done skilfully. A highly professional landing for sure, but heroism doesn't enter into it. But its no good telling the maggots of the media that I suppose.
Just remember the poor sod who did similar in the Iranian 727 last week - he's had hic licence suspended pending what sounds like a criminal investigation and is probably deeply in the dwang. Nice!
In my incident (UK international scheduled public transport) it never made the press, my accident report was never submitted to the Authority and all I got was a bottle of wine and made "redundant" a few weeks later. No cries of heroism there. There are many different ways airlines choose to skin this particular cat.