I read that appeal judgment as one that addresses the first trial judge's reasons for coming to the conclusions he did. The trial judge said that lowering the gear contributing to an increased rate of descent and therefore should not have been done, in contravention of the POH. The appeal judge said that the first judge had not considered whether the second stage of the engine failure - going from partial to full loss of power had actually happened, and therefore that it was unreasonable to attribute failure to make the field solely to the pilot for lowering the gear. The POH called for gear up in a crash landing; until the second stage of the power failure, there was not going to be a crash landing, just a normal landing, albeit with less than normal power available, and on a normal landing ground.
None of the appeal judgment addresses the pilot's discretion to ignore the POH; indeed, it's not apparent that he did ignore the POH.