It's worth remembering that neither of these guys set out with the intention to crash an aeroplane that day. They'd probably had nothing particularly untoward happen in their respective careers and if they'd allowed some bad habits to develop those habits had been let through because 99% of the time nothing much happens and when something does happen the automatics work as expected.
The point is that we should take this as an opportunity to examine our own habits and make sure we haven't allowed them to deteriorate. Do we
always read the FMA? I bet most of us do, some of us do most of the time but might have lapses under pressure, and a few of us are slack and don't really do it at all. Do we
always monitor the automatics adequately? I bet everyone here has been a bit slack on occasion, humans make bad monitors after all.
If you were to ask those two guys prior to the accident if they push the thrust levers up on a go-around, I'm sure they'd've said "of course!" but we aren't perfect and don't always react under pressure the way we'd like to think we would. Maybe we think we push the levers up but really we've got into the habit of just following them up with the autothrottle. It seems the Airbus system wins this little battle.
I ask myself, would you have pushed the thrust levers up? And I'm absolutely certain I would have, but I've flown with a bloke who selected flap zero after take-off instead of gear up and he was utterly dumbfounded that he'd done it. So I like to think I would but maybe given the right combination of fatigue, mindset, procedures, previous experience etc, I'd screw it up as well.
Stay ever vigilant out there
.