OK my pet peeve dealt with, 'macho pilots rubbishing fellow pilots'..... There but for the grace of god go we all!
You can call it macho all you want and I'm not rubbishing them - I'm saying they screwed up and ruined a perfectly good plane through their actions. Do you disagree? We all face problems like severe turbulence throughout our flying career, if I were to destroy a plane in a turbulence encounter then I will expect to answer for my actions alone, and I would not allow my peers to point to a manufacturer as the cause.
In my opinion this is no different than AF447 of Colgan 3407 except that by the grace of god (as you put it) this crew didn't kill anyone. Crews on those flights, like this one, couldn't handle an abnormal situation and escalated it through drastic and incorrect control inputs. To caudle (sp?) them and act like they played no part in this accident does not help our profession one bit.
Engineers design aircraft to be flown by professional pilots, not to build triple redundant restrictions on normal flight controls to prevent a pilot from doing what he or she knows they should not be doing. If they made it harder to engage ground idle how long would it be before some yahoo runs a plane off the runway and I have to hear people defend him saying the triggers are too hard to engage?
Do I think this pilot should be hung out to dry? Absolutely not - I'm sure he rightly returned to the line and has been doing fine since. But I do think that if we sit here and state anything but the crew caused this accident we'd be doing a disservice to aviation safety.
Too often now low quality pilots are tarnishing our profession. We need to stop soft-balling them in the name of solidarity and start calling people on the crap they pull that puts the flying public at risk. If we as a community don't correct problems like that internally then it'll be left to the heavy hand of legislation (and to a degree it already is moving in that direction). Personally I'd rather we called a spade a spade and let this crew know they messed it up and retrain them accordingly than leave it to a bunch of engineers to make a band-aid fix on the DHC-8 to prevent a pilot from lifting the triggers, ignoring the warning bell, and moving the PL into ground idle.