I've heard and read enough to form an opinion as to the most likely cause of the accident. I'm going to keep that opinion to myself to respect the wishes of the company but more importantly, to respect the pilots involved. I wasn't there, I don't know for sure.
The bounced landing is not untrained as some have said, but some airlines do not give it much time and more importantly, do not really have a formally laid out SOP for it. Automation reliance is a problem, the 320 through the trees was due to someone thinking he understood the system well, but tragically failing to appreciate a small but vital piece of knowledge. The 777 into SFO certainly had contributing factors relating to auto flight that influenced the outcome. How an individual or individuals react or recover from the startle effect is variable depending on how the atoms are put together when they were created, unfortunately some will recover from startle quicker than others. The ones you don't hear about are a combination of sheer luck and the attributes / abilities of the crew on the day. ( there for the grace of your god etc )
In another life more Orange than this one, this very subject became the main focus of a recurrent sim after various incidents around the world involving bounced landings in airbus types.. It was discovered that the programming of the spoiler extension, could under certain circumstances, result in an aircraft being high ( off a decent bounce ) with the thrust off and the spoilers at full extension. When replicated in the Sim this resulted in the aircraft dropping like a tool box onto the runway....it was an eye opener. The solution was for airbus to reprogram the spoilers to only go to half extension unless more parameters were satisfied. This stopped the aircraft plummeting quite so hard back onto the runway. When combined with a program to teach pilots how to fly away from a big bounce or land off what we described as a "skip", the hard landing rate reduced significantly.
Lessons will be learnt and Boeing may even reprogram the automation in recognition of the potential threat in situations like this. The fact remains, as people have said in previous posts, we have to keep flying the aircraft when things don't go to plan. I think it was Bob Hoover who said "keep flying through the crash".. sound advice, but how many of us really know how we would react under the same circumstances. At the end of the day we are a community and should stick together, our jobs are stressful enough with the myriad of tests, medicals and hoops that we constantly have to jump through. If we drop the ball, shouldn't we be able to rely on the one group of people who know what its like to do what we do?
BS