C'ture… surely at Habsheim there was no speed to trade for height? And no power to allow a climb… The option to fly a Pugachev Cobra over the trees was not available.
Could a pair of A320 test pilots have wrestled it closer to stalling, missing the trees, if handed the accident aircraft without its fly by wire protections five seconds away from the tree line? I'm skeptical. How many tries would typically be required in a simulator to miss the obstacle once full power was requested?
The hardware and software seemed to have done a fairly good job of giving the crew the chance to save the day from a bad position.
Did the throttle refuse to comply with their demands? I'm not convinced. The conspiracy-inclined documentaries I've seen seem to be a bit light on discussions of sound travel time and speed reconstruction from the video frames. I've seen no reason to doubt the official report.
Did the elevators refuse to allow them to pitch up into a stall? I would contend that the answer is yes… as designed.
I think a fairer question is whether the fly-by-wire 320 and its competitor are been lost in accidents at a different rate. A320s are at about 24:10,000, while 737NGs are at about 9:3500. It's about equal, although A320s have rather longer in service to compare. FBW is clearly doing no great harm across the spectrum.