"If they were to claim credit for this, and it ends up being a technical issue that caused it, it would discredit the organization who claimed credit."
This didn't stop multiple claims being made after Lockerbie, all done by the next morning. IIRC, PA103 was also supposed to be over the Atlantic at the time of detonation, but local traffic and a delayed departure sent it over Lockerbie instead.
If this plane was downed deliberately then a marine ditching means it takes longer to find out the whole picture. Look how quickly they worked out what happened with Germanwings, whereas the bulk of MH370 remains unfound.
I really don't want to end up reading that this is a terror strike, but nobody admitting anything so far doesn't mean it isn't (hopefully that's better logic than Trump's, but that doesn't take much).
Taking earlier comments about the smooth nature of the initial turns, if there was a fire or explosion, the suggestion is a small one getting out of hand, rather than a more sudden one? But if this was anything like AC797, why turn 360 over sea instead of heading towards the nearest available runway?
If there was any form of sabotage in the cockpit (and I don't think anyone has ruled out this being from the crew, we know of previous disputes and can't ignore MS 990), would the descent be smooth like that?
We all want answers, because most of us here have some sort of job depending on both crew and SLF confidence. Of course the papers love the headlines "holiday jet blown out the sky", but CDG-CAI is a much more mundane (in headline terms) business and VFR* route, but still enough reasons for somebody to want to down a plane if they had the means. If the target was specifically tourism, would you not go for a flight to one of the resorts? I know there is a rather large group of ancient tetrahedral structures in the Cairo suburbs, but the tourist volumes are (were) all on the beaches.
I don't think we can draw many more conclusions until the boxes are recovered, but for all the noise that inevitably surrounds these events, a small fire getting out of hand is looking as plausible as any more sinister theory from what we have so far.
*to avoid double jargon confusion, in this sense I mean VFR as visiting friends and relatives