The armoured and lockable flight crew door was brought in after 2001 to stop unauthorised access. It was designed deliberately so that if there was a conscious pilot inside, there was no means short of high explosives for a “hostile” to force entry, even with complete knowledge of the mechanism, codes, etc. Also, another crew member could not be coerced into opening it by some “secret” method.
In this particular case, it functioned as specified.
I tend to concur it is perhaps less to do with the design of the door security (and glad discussion has died down from this), and more a problem on how to detect pilots with medical conditions making them unfit to be entrusted with the lives of their fellow crew and passengers. There is no easy solution to this, but like all noteworthy accidents, it will certainly get a lot in the industry thinking and talking about it.
Absolutely. The problem many of us have who actually work in the industry is that knee-jerk reactions to very rare/unlikely events often lead to an overall reduction in safety standards as very few of the implications have been properly thought through.
One might even argue that as the “pool” of pilots with current medicals and mental illnesses sufficiently severe for suicide at work to be a possibility is demonstrably tiny, a recent reduction in this number by one is significant.