Well, MM43, how about "adverse yaw"? Could have been a player.
When Doze tried the sim he used rudder to correct roll, not aileron. Using aileron at extreme AoA will definitely cause the nose to move the opposite way you are used to at low AoA. Retired will tell you that in the Phantom, guys would lock the stick between their legs and use rudder for roll when at high AoA. The A-7 was not as bad, but we used the same technique.
Of course, using rudder trim could have helped, if not cured, the constant turn we see in the traces.
Let's face it. The crew was not prepared to fly the beast outside the envelope they were trained to do. Maybe a cosmic test pilot would have seem what was happening and done real fine, but the crew was not trained for that, nor probably had no experience in high performance jets that routinely flew at the limits or even exceeded them. So I'll cut them a small amount of slack in that regard.