Dozy,
I recognize that my views are fundamental not professional in the sense that my actual first hand experience is limited to basic airman-ship (152/172) vs flying more complex aircraft. With that caveat out of the way my personal feeling is that the entire airbus concept is the single worst development in professional aviation. It unquestioningly takes flying to the lowest common denominator and I think that AF447 has to be taken as the wake up call.
In spite of the endless drivel and speculation this should have been a non-event. For a professional pilot to lose an air frame that was handed off from the AP in an entirely stable configuration is unfathomable (vs a circumstance where the AP "spun out" until the airplane was in an entirely unstable configuration).
In effect the specter of "what is it doing now" has met the reality of why isn't it doing what it needs to? Evan as an "amateur" pilot the total lack of airmanship in this incident astounds me. At the end of the day the blunt truth is that the PF was fundamentally incompetent...and that is a scary reality.