Thank you IanW and Machinbird. Two voices of reason and experience after a lot of blaah blaah.
For me the beginning of the flight, the lack of ATC/military response and the delay for announced SAR have never seemed to be a big issue, so your posts make sense. Obviously the why, the wherefore and finally the where are different questions.
The last couple of days there has been a lot of discussion about the validity of the CVR/FDR pings. I get the impression that the media have picked up and rehashed old info so that suddenly all the detections are suspect despite the lack of a statement from the JACC to this effect. Something very strange is going on if the double acoustic pings with the right duration have nothing to do with MH370, so here's hoping that the new search finally finds the aircraft.