The handling of the SAR may be embarrassing for some parties, but ultimately it is hard to see we would be any closer to finding the aircraft, even if they had worked better.
Well, that depends on where the aircraft is. If it's in the Indian Ocean perhaps things floated for even a week or two and then sank, in which case searching there earlier might have made all the difference.
The trouble is that right now we don't seem to have much to go on! I'm not even completely sure we know it went south. That seems to my mind to be a solid hypothesis rather than an established fact. Sufficient to direct resources there, but...