1. Flying a healthy airplane in bad weather or at night is difficult.
2. Flying an unhealthy airplane in good weather is difficult.
3. Hand-flying an A330 in good weather at cruise with the autopilot disconnected is darned near impossible.
On AF447, it appears that either the pitot tubes went bad or one of the ADIRUs that was driving the cockpit displays and the autopilot went bad (or both), causing the autopilot to disconnect and depriving the pilots of critical information necessary to hand-fly the airplane.
So there they were:
a. trying to hand-fly an airplane that couldn’t be hand-flown in the best of circumstances
b. not knowing which of their conflicting sources of attitude, airspeed and altitude was correct
c. in the middle of a gawdawful thunderstorm at night
From there, it’s a short step to either getting too slow and stalling/spinning, or too fast and loosing the wings to an updraft.
Which is pretty much exactly what I said in my posts.
It would seem the only disagreement is that I agreed with another poster that in those weather conditions, and assuming the FBW system as well as the pilots were getting incorrect sensor readings, extra speed could have led to a stall.
Note: I also believe that extra 'power' could have been added by pilots or the flight system , without producing extra speed, and therefore contributing to a stall (as in a nose up situation).