Lyman,
i´m not following your asessment.
As a pilot you follow the "intruments" as long as it makes sense. To follow a FD bar would be totally out of this world, when Altimeter tells you you are climbing above max altitude, when pitch tells you your nose is far too high, when stall warning screams you are stalled, when VSI shows values not common in cruise flight, when the aircraft behaviour tells you you are flying my airframe outside healthy parameters.
I´m not saying that it might have influenced their thinking in some kind of way, but you can´t construct the whole accident around it.