Course profile
"There is a piece of technology that would have prevented this crash happening, but it was turned off. It wasn't broken, it was turned off with no contingency being put in place, because it would have been more expensive to put that contingency in place.
To me, it seems a highly difficult position to defend."
I won't speculate as to the precise role the lack of an ILS played in this accident but in a wider context I would say it is good thing if it is addressed. SFO and JFK are major international airports and I can only guess that their use of non precision approaches is to do with capacity issues. International long haul pilots are not used to flying visual approaches regularly because other countries, from what I have seen, use the ILS as intended. If one does have to shoot a non precision approach then it is normally because the airport doesn't have an ILS at all.
As for stabilised approaches then you need to interview ATC as to why they give unworkable constraints like 180 kts to 5 nm. As others have said you learn to ignore it if you want to make the 1000 ft gate all done and dusted.