Your quote above, Yellow Pen, startles me as I always thought that this was how every approach was done. regardless of the weather or the wind.
No, it isn't. Perhaps you are not quite up to speed with the latest thinking? Approach briefings need to be relevant to the circumstances of the day. Labour the same points each and every time and people stop listening. The first element on our approach briefing is THREATS. I rarely brief the threat of a high energy approach with a go-around at LHR because the ATC is almost always excellent, I'm unlikely to be held so high that it becomes a handling issue and the go around routing is benign. I'm more likely to discuss the possibility of a low go-around due to a blocked runway than a rushed approach. On the other hand at SFO I'll always brief energy management in more detail as it's pertinent, as ATC have unrealistic expectations of what our aircraft can do and it's the worst place on our network for unstable approaches by a long margin.
I now understand why accidents can happen since, according to your thinking, any kind of "out the box thinking" has to be properly briefed before hand
Properly briefing in advance helps you to avoid having to think "outside the box". My goal is to stay in the box whenever possible. Perhaps if Air France had done some proper briefing they'd have avoided having to think out of the box as they careered off the end of the runway at YYZ? As for the AF447, unreliable IAS indications is hardly classified as 'out of the box' thinking. It's pretty routine fodder for throwing into the end of a take off briefing as todays 'food for thought' item. Perhaps if they had briefed it they wouldn't have responded to it by pulling and holding full back stick and stalling the aircraft?
Once again, refering to your quote above, are you implying that Alpageur and other such cow-boys were not managing their energy in a planned fashion or that they were otherwise not focused on the approach? Isn't a missed approach always "likely". I do think he was arguing that very fact a few pages ago.
No, I'm stating my opinion that aiming to be stable at the gate rather than before is unwise and leaves you very little slack when things go wrong. I believe it was Alpagueur who was implying that being slick was somehow terribly impressive and more conservative flying demonstrated a lack of skill. As to 'likely', there are varying degrees of 'likeliness'. It's always a possibility, just like the wings might fall off, but you brief the important threats, not the trivia.