OC
your instruments will tell you what is actually going on not what you believe the position of the stick is.
absolutely correct, but.....
..........the instruments dont tell, why something is happening.
A climbing indication can be caused by an intentional stick input, by turbulence, by an updraft, or by a stick input seconds before. The aircraft can still be in a climb, the pitch can still be positive, the VS can still be positive, and the Stick is in neutral or even forward.
In the F4 we had no autothrottle, but a possibility of autoacceleration of the engine with certain malfunctions (aux air doors failed). The RPM increased to 100%, but we could see the unchanged throttle position and that therefore it was a malfunction and not an inadvertent advance of power, which caused the RPM to rise. Had our throttles in the front and backseat not been interconnected, a rise in RPM observed on the rpm gauge in both cockpits could have been a malfunction or a willing act of the other guy.
In case of AF447 it might have been helpful for the PNF and the captain to know, what kind of SS input the PF was doing in assisting the process of correlating the behaviour of the aircraft with the !!!wrong!!! inputs of the PF, thus aiding in failure assesment and leading to problem solving. Same might be true for the THS trim position as well as the Throttle position.
As long as the PF is doing what PNF would do himself, as long as he is acting in the expectation pattern, the instruments give all necessary information. But it gets tricky, when the instruments do not correlate with the expectation pattern and there is no other means to crosscheck why that would be the case, because the instruments only tell you what is happening.
Now you have to evaluate what caused the discrepancy from the expected, turbulence? flight control malfunction? updraft? indicator malfunction? unintended flightcontrol input? Deliberate flight control input?
OC
We have a flight crew non performance here and given the evidence we have this crew would have not been able to deal with the situation no matter what their input device was. That is the sad reality.
That might be true, unfortunately.
OC
I have no problem with you preferring the yoke but once you depart from the objective standpoint you end up in the area of speculation.
Imho the standpoints donīt differ that much from each other concerning objectivity and speculation. Nobody knows what would have happened, when............
We know however what had happened with AF447, and that one was not desireable as many other accidents with or without SS / Yoke.
So it is worth to think over all issues, might they be liked or not.