Well in general if you screw up high up you can covert your potential energy into kinetic and get away with it.
But you do have certain situations such as
spinning.
Which require more height, a lot more height.
And to be honest it depends on who is on the stick how much you will use.
Similar to boats at lower speeds the controls are less effective. It is not a speed regime that commercial pilots are used to be in especially if they do their recurrent checks on the aircraft.
there is also a thing called
Vmca
There are loads of factors, which as the Captain you have to make sure you don't put your self in the position of being exposed to these factors.
The development of a Captain starts the first day they step into a cockpit, it doesn't matter how much theory you pump into them they get led by the Captains they fly with. I very much doubt the Captain made what he did up on the day.
You also have to think about the time scale involved at the speeds and rates of decent we are talking about. At the normal 700-800ft per min approach decent rate 50ft is only 4 seconds. Which doesn't give you a lot of time to sort things out. Which is why most Captains would have been flying it themselves and not allowing a low houred FO to fly the approach.
Here is a video of a fully automated airbus doing a landing in better conditions than they had on the day.
.
And this one in slightly worse.
It very hard to describe the final moments of a minimums approach, your adrenaline is up from 200ft its see the lights and 20 seconds later your on the ground. The beating your body gets from hormones just doing a successful approach once is quite high but, to then put it through the same thing 3 times they will have been in a form of battle shock getting low on energy and I wouldn't be surprised if the FO's limbs will have been twitching with having coming up and down off an adrenaline high so often with no real time to recover. He won't have been used to it with his experience he must have been terrified. Even after a minimums legal landing inexperienced FO's are buzzing on the adrenalin. Doing it three times will have used up all his ready energy and his body will have been in emergency mode with its reduction in reaction times and performance both physical and mental.
From the CVR recording it went from everything illegal but seeming OK to crash in 2 seconds.