Dozy. You're last paragraph re: pilots/Air France. Excellent. It pulls together a major portion of the impetus for disaster we see in this tragedy. I completely agree. Allow me a small addition? With the stage set for LOC in manual under these conditions, (and they were stinko), Airbus shows a remarkable blind spot in monitoring their product whilst in service. This is not a third world fifth owner operator, it is a legacy Flag Carrier.
Wildly expensive and complicated machine systems need nurture. In seeing to it that her operators were allowed singly to abuse her care and operation was a major player in her demise. Her makers lost the marque.
If one truly believes that as automatics increase in capability, Pilotage can degrade, the coffin business will bloom, leastwise whilst airborne.