The BIG problem/issue here is that the Indonesian military knew immediately that the plane had veered off course, yet for TWO DAYS let searchers waste their time looking hundreds of miles in a different direction..
I think the big problem here is that from the standpoint of the flight controllers, we aren't being told what happened which in part fuels some of the wild speculation.
Does a live human actually monitor the radar, does a computer do the monitoring, or are all the return signals just blips on a screen possibly being recorded?
If the plane deviated from course, for how long did it deviate before a human figured out something was wrong?
Then we need to know how contact was lost? Was it in a manner consistent with a sudden breakup at flight altitude, nose dive, controlled decent, or something else?
More likely that they didn’t discover that westward turn until a careful study was being done of military radar records. Transponders weren’t on, probably took a little sleuthing to realize that.