Trying to take one step back from this matter, it would appear that the common issue in both this incident and the Air France accident is that the failure occurred in a manner that was not simply discoverable by the crew, all the crew sees is the outcome, thus leaving them guessing as to what the fault isolation and corrective action might be.
I know this is basically a safety philosophy matter which has probably been covered by many metres thick of learned papers, but we do not seem to have redundant, independent systems for fault monitoring.
To put that another way; the stuff that is flying the aircraft is supposed to tell you when its failed, and if it doesn't, then there is bugger all you can do about the failure.
For example, take the case of the A380 engine failure. Would the crew have been able to correctly diagnose what had happened if the failure had occurred at night, without loud noises and in turbulence? Would the fuel leak and structural damage have been visible? There would have been no "Skipper we've lost an engine, we have a fuel leak and dirty great hole in the wing". Instead the crew would have to wade through the 50+ ECAM messages and try and deduce what had happened, starting with the question "Is the ECAM telling me the truth, or is it broken as well?"
At least with control cables there is some redundant haptic feedback as to what might be going on at the other end.
To put that another way, how many Airbus accidents have been caused by the sophistication and elegance of its control systems?
We have at least AF447, VH-QPA, F-WWKH and Aeroflot 593.