What we had was a low hour, low recency pilot in an aeroplane that was fairly complex and he wasn't yet very familiar with, in poor conditions.
Putting aside the pilot's arguably poor judgement in getting airborne, and then in not knocking the flight on the head earlier - I agree with skyranger. The pilot has probably got negative spare capacity there, and we're all told (rightly) "aviate, navigate, communicate" - so having squawked 0011 so people know where he is, he's knocked active communication on the head.
In that narrow context, his approach is reasonable. Again, the problem is that he got himself into that position, not in my opinion the specifics of not communicating when he was busy managing everything else going on.
G