Very good post Sheppey.
I would suggest that the Dutch investigator has missed a golden opportunity here. Instead of concetrating on how to slaughter the geese, once they had determined that these 2 did not folow a basic procedure, they should have dug a lot deeper by questioning the crew on their knowledge of take-off procedures and the reasons we have them instead of Oh that was question 26 and the answer is A.
The PM should have been doing his job, which primarily is MONITORING. If PM does not know what should be happening then how can he monitor?
This is the problem of having 250 hour guys in the RHS unless they are very well trained. Even AF failed in this. This is not a new problem. Air Florida at Washington was another classic example of 2 pilots not knowing what was going on through lack of training. I remember the reams of paper coming out from Boeing and PW regarding EPR indications and the need to back it up with N1 and FF indications.
The training industry is presently geared up to spew out as many pilots as possible at the lowest price, hoping that the airlines will rectify the lack of knowledge. The regulators have also not helped by using multi choice to save money and then making the question database available to the schools for Rote learning. Also RAM is one of the airlines offering cheap type ratings.
Here was a golden opportunity for the Authority to really find out what is going on. However due to cost cutting is there anyone in the authority with the knowledge to identify the problem? The 2 pilots survived the incident (luckily) and are available for in depth questioning, not on just what hapened but also the rest of their knowledge.