I haven't read the complete accident report and only wish to offer a quick comment regarding this accident. What I see gives some credence to Confiture’s point of view. For common reference, I'll provide a link to a particular video of the incident and mention some key events.
Crash Airbus A320-Vol 296 Air France - YouTube.
The pilot had two problems. He needed to accelerate his engines and needed to clear the trees. Jet pilots cannot forget the spool up time of their engines but at Habsheim that day, use of automation seems to have gotten in the way and created a surprise and a delay in adding power.
After rollout on heading, there are two small pitch adjustments visible. One at T=11 sec, and one at T=14 sec. These are possibly pulls on the stick intended to trigger Alpha Floor (which was not available).
The aircraft began to impact trees around T=26, or about 12 seconds after the second pitch adjustment.
If the pilot had been able to activate Alpha Floor at the second nose twitch, it appears (to me) that he would have cleared the trees.
But let’s look at the problem a little differently, from the viewpoint of what a small increment of g acceleration would have done for the flight path.
If .01 additional g was available at the second nose twitch and for the next 12 seconds, the aircraft cg would be about 23 feet higher-probably not enough to avoid an accident.
If .02 additional g was available at the second nose twitch for the next 12 seconds, the aircraft cg would be about 46 feet higher and would probably have escaped since the engines were spooling up nicely by then. (actually slightly less high since he would have converted some of his kinetic energy to potential energy and it probably would not be possible to maintain all the additional g for the duration.)
Perhaps you suspect that even that that small amount of additional g was not available, but consider that the video shows an alignment turn seconds before the nose twitches up. Was he decelerating that fast that there was absolutely nothing left to maneuver at the end?
In other words, if a measly .02 additional g had been available, the Habsheim event likely would not have been an accident. Would an additional.02 g have been available if the maneuver was flown in direct law and the pilot had pulled just slightly past optimum AOA and then eased off to optimum? That is definitely faster than an asymptotic approach to applying g and is the way most experienced manual pilots would lay on rapid g.
Looking at the Gordon Corps video, it seems there might well be some additional g potential/ AOA in the A320 Normal law being held back as a “safety margin”.