Edited to Add: I'm sure somebody asked..
Maybe the pilot did crash the plane intentionally, maybe he didn't. I don't know. I just get the feeling that there was too much of a rush to pin blame somewhere and now that the snowball has started rolling nobody is trying very hard to slow it down or stop it completely.
My thoughts on this (and they're not original):
The first raw "hearing" of the CVR, plus the info from ATC, may well have been extremely damning and I suspect no matter how often you listened to it, analysed it, the conclusion was always going to be the same- in most accidents there will be "grey areas" or unknowns that need investigating before any conclusion could be drawn, but not here. Nevertheless I suspect in time honoured fashion the authorities may well have wanted to sit on the initial conclusions for a while, awaiting further analysis/data (e.g. the FDR) but somebody very rapidly leaked what was heard on the CVR, at least in part, to the media (and hands up, yes, I was very sceptical of the NY Times but it seems they were right, at least in part). At that point the authorities realised the game was up and that releasing a standard statement along the lines of "no comment, we are months off reaching an absolutely definite conclusion, our report will be published next year" wasn't going to cut it.
It's kind of difficult to see how the authorities could have handled this particular accident any differently, but it doesn't bode well (IMHO) for people's expectations in the wake of any future accidents.