I wouldn't say the ATR's crap.....But no doubt it's got more than its fair share of gotchas.
I had about 1,400 hours on both 42 and 72 spread over about 15 years, on and off, and it was never amongst my favourites.
I never experienced the iceing incident we're discussing here, but I do remember during the TR being warned about it. However, if you've never experienced it and, like me, about the best you can remember how to deal with it is the page number in the manual, then I can have some sympathies for the crew here when you're faced with a situation you've never experienced before and you do what seems ' appropriate ' while your colleague is desperately trying to find the page in the manual.
And just a thought....If airframers can create and install the automatics for detecting problems such as this one and warn you on the various displays, why can't they extend that functionality to either display the instructions written in the Ops Manual or to automatically initiate the required actions and then inform the crew what and why the machine's doing what its doing through the displays with a simple ' accept ' or ' reject ' for the crew.
Within the grand scheme of things, that wouldn't be an impossibly expensive fit into new machines and , depending on the actual age / spec of the machine involved, perhaps also not an impossibly expensive upgrade to older machines.