“Wooden pallets are also quite common on every ship in the world.”
Yes they are. Could be anything. Even when we had appreciable floating debris pinpointing the general impact point of AF447 it took two years to find the plane itself. We may well be talking about this thing for years to come.
They found debris very quickly from the AF jet, specifically the tail section. The challenge here is not to find the plane, but just to find ANY debris. 4 days of having a “clue” from two separate coordinates by satellite of what looks to be the same object has still netted no, zip, zero results even when they knew where to look for this “debris”.