I found it easy for people on these forums to judge what happen that night! With error messages, alarms and confusion going on, and with short time to re-act, and possible adverse weather conditions that was not what they expected, they ended up having a bad day.
If either of this had happen individually, things would have been very different, but faith had it this night, that they just got handed to much on their plate at one time!
Differentiating between Low Speed Buffet or High Speed Buffet, was one issue.
Had a larger storm gone undetected due their WX radar settings!
Unreliable speed indication due to the pitot system.
Loads of system error messages etc.
It is easy to say what should have been done in hind-sight, when you know what is going to come!
The STUPID Stick vs Yoke debate / Airbus vs Boeing debate!
Completely irrelevant!
I am not expert, with a lot of if's, this could have been avoided, but who knows how other's would have re-acted in this first situation.
I would say the main error was that they did not divert around the storms, however I did read one report somewhere, that they might have been reluctant to do that, as that would have meant they would have had to done a re-fuelling stop, which would have delayed them. According to an article in Der Spiegel some time back.
A combination of Pilot error, company pressure and Airbus fault, seems that it has all added together to create a Swiss Cheese perfectly lined up for disaster.