To contradict Olasek's post 302, this crew were not experienced. The FO was reasonably so for his position, but not the Captain. Both were clearly former cadets, with less than 200 hours each on ac other than the 737, so their manual handling and raw data skills were never honed. To have a Captain on such an aircraft at c.2300 hours total time is very unusual in the West, though I couldn't guess whether it's more normal in other regions, but regardless, it's a very small amount of time to have been promoted.
I fly with a lot of cadet pilots, and some of them are astonishingly sharp and able, while others not so much. However, they all lack basic skills which would be honed by more experience before jumping into a jet where the automatics prevent a development of handling and instrument interpretation. It is crucial to encourage cadets to hand fly and make visual and raw data approaches when the circumstances are good for such practice in order to hone their skills (and likewise for experienced crews to retain them). Whether such inexperience in manual IMC handling was a factor in this specific incident remains to be seen, but seeing that background and the Captain's lack of experience jumps out at me as being a plausible contributing factor.