Some good thoughtful posts.
Given that windshear was present, it would have also been turbulent, and one thing that I have never seen addressed is our use of a only a single hand to fly when flying a complex manouver.
It is SOP to have one hand on the thrust levers and one on the yoke/side-stick on finals, but of course this means that only half of one's brain is being used to manipulate the attitude control of the aircraft. {The human brain is configured such that only the right side of the brain controls the left hand and vice-versa}. Add to this, the majority of people are right handed. So when a person flies from the left seat, as well as only using half their brain capacity, they are most likely to be using their non-dominant hand/brain side to operate the attitude controls in what can be a highly dynamic, quickly changing scenario. The other half of their hand/brain control capacity is simply static on the thrust levers.
I can imagine that given a turbulent approach, the Captain might have needed/wanted much finer control on the yoke and therefore having pressed TOGA, I wonder did he then take his right hand off the thrust levers and onto the yoke so all of his brain and both hands were being used to control the plane - trusting that the autothrust would do what he wanted? With moving thrust levers, there is perhaps less reliance given to monitoring the engine N1/EPR gauges, and so the lack of spool up might have been missed by both pilots?
If all this was the case it should have led to a much earlier go-around decision of course, but as I say, I have never seen this single handed business discussed.
(Obviously, one can only have one hand on a side-stick, but the FBW computers do at least assist the pilot, which mitigate this to some extent)
As many of us keep saying; the answer has to be better training.
We are always told how we must fly but one thing that might be beneficial might be to give us scenarios in the SIM that will deliberately lead to bad things happening? For example, landing on a short runway with a speed of +10kts leading to an over-run. The pilots would be told what was going to happen, and no jeapordy would be invoked, but it might be useful to actually experience the consequences of mis-handling. Otherwise, as long as we are there or thereabouts within the limits, we pass our SIM check and maybe never really appreciate what could happen if we went outside limits.
In the SIM recently I was given the scenario of AF447 - without being told it was going to happen, and the Captain was in on the plan, so he did/said nothing. To my absolute horror, I did pretty much the same thing as those AF pilots - (although I thought it was a Vaplha prot issue). Now obviously, I know the unreliable speed drill, but this was so subtle that I did not recognise it as such. Having had it demonstrated to me in that very dramatic way it will stay with me for ever and if I ever see that situation developing, I will know exactly what to do. (One thing that blocked my thinking was the very loud and persistent overspeed alarm, which drowned out the "stall stall stall")
My point is that any amount of words on a page about the incident and how to deal with unreliable speed etc, did not help me, but actually seeing and experiencing how subtle it can be and how it can go wrong first-hand has gone deep into my brain.