Please close this thread now
I think just about everything that can be known about this tragedy is known. Everything that can be said about it has been said.
It is an important incident in the history of commercial aviation and, of course it will never happen again. There is no point having any more circular discussions about pitots, or center column vs side stick, automation vs hand flying, or B vs A in the context of this incident.
But there will be new incidents like this (hopefully without loss of life) involving the whole system of pilots, CRM, automation and basic equipment faults. There are lessons for everyone. It was especially shocking for me reading the final report on AF447 to see that apart from the pitots, nothing actually failed on the aircraft, until everything did. A simple LOC grew out of all proportions into a major disaster. It happened in a manner that is a foretaste (a bitter one) of the kind of challenges that aviation is going to face. Every extra subsystem adds complexity. Failures, when they occur will be increasingly complex and ever harder to anticipate.
I think future discussions wrt AF447 should focus on this in general, not on the specifics of what happened to the pitots or what was in PF minds during the incident. Let them rest in peace.