That one had all sorts of 'experts' going out of their nuts on 'gotta' be a missile' comments.
So, reeling back toward Flight 800 as I recall I was the only one on any of the threads to note that a bolid coming in over the horizon would look like a missile streaking up and not a meteor simply going into low orbit where it connected with an airplane.
So, one more time folks, there was a regularly scheduled meteor shower that evening ~ it'd been underway in Europe for quite some time and the zone where they became visible to us finally rotated into the debris raining down. However, there are always some early chunks that are a bit bigger ~ being outside the main path of the ancient comet that left that stuff in the way, they can retain size better. Might even have been several chunks and observers on the surface would see them climbing up, not coming down!
Safe to say the center tank didn't need to explode at all to knock that plane out of the sky.
After slicing on Occam's Razor, your explanation seems likeliest.
However, that doesn't explain why the Feds went to such ridiculous lengths to conduct such a crazy explanation that defies known principals of flight and the law of gravity.