Gullibell, the mission of SAR is to letdown over the ocean, acquire the target and save people. What they were doing may not have been the Ideal approach certainly the vertical profile, but in principle it is the bread and butter of SAR and for that matter, an ARA. In this respect we all operate with the RADAR and the RADALT. They were using both. The key to understanding how the missed they rock lies with the RADAR. FLIR on their MFDs may have helped as might NVG. However as an ARA can quite legitimately get you to 200 feet and still be in solid IMC, only the RADAR can keep you safe, or so we have all assumed.
Knowing exactly how the RADAR was tuned and what procedures there were in place to achieve this is core to the interests of all of us flying over the oceans doing Letdowns or ARAs.
In most Organisations the tuning of the Radar is informally taught during line training, legacy driven, and on this hill of hindsight may well be inadequate.
For all persons in a supervisory role in the SAR and O&G I would recommend this issue alone is rapidly addressed and the training formalised to standardise to an ideal setup for each individual type of equipment. overlay issues must be addressed.
The IFR /VFR arguments are a red herring when taken in the wider context of the average mission profile, that is, to descend in IMC to a target.