Whatever the stab position/angle how come pulling ("pull,pull,pull") back on the CC doesn't raise the nose even one inch?
What I was getting at above is that there may be limits to the 'power' of the elevators relative to the 'power' of the hori-stab. The elevators are small compared to the stabiliser, so if ( due to a reason I won't speculate on) the nose of the aircraft was allowed to get to very low attitudes (-20? -30? ) then do the elevators have enough power to correct the situation from that altitude?
I'm not at all convinced that this is what happened, I was just surprised that with all the technical discussion around the pitch control of the aircraft nobody had mentioned the STS.