My degree was in psychology, and from that perspective I feel few of the posited scenarios really allow for the vagaries of human cognition. The human mind takes the fewest shortcuts when deliberate undivided attention is being devoted to an unfamiliar task. This pilot was undertaking a somewhat familiar task, and thinking psychologically I'd speculate that something caused his attention to be distracted in a way which felt perfectly professional in the moment. Perhaps a thrust anomaly, perhaps a heading error. But immediately the new task is in the foreground. In such circumstances the 'routine' task can be done so 'automatically' that one may simply see what one expects to see, or not register something unexpected which is abnormal. Such 'misdirection' is the stock in trade of magicians, but is actually a fundamental weakness of human cognition.
My point is that nobody is immune to this: one can make it more or less likely, but it's always a potential occurrence. A lot of the debate about 'could a pilot overlook this or attempt that' misses the point: he was probably cognitively misdirected by something that was in itself relatively benign or even an objective or conjectured false alarm. A final tragic factor in such cases can be exacerbated confusion upon spotting the approaching danger: that anomaly may at least momentarily be attributed to the in-fact-trivial but unusual problem rather than the real one of being behind the overall situation.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us