That's commentary. We can reasonably speculate they were looking at warnings and the flight log, autopilot is only one part of the flight director and as autopilot was never turned back on, pointing at it seems odd.
Changing settings in the flight director is very much an action (not mere commentary). Plus it's a good distraction from flying the plane — especially while the overspeed alarm is going off.
Most pilots are rationnal and pretty smart people. Implying that two of them are stupid enough to "play" with the autopilot in this situation is pretty insulting.
This kind of reactions are interesting though. I might tour facebook, twitter and reddit to see if it's widespread.
Nothing. There's no basis for expecting such madness. The emergency AD following LNI610 doesn't at all account for significant mistrim, the possibility of heavy jackscrew loading forces that could prevent manual (handcrank) retrim, and the necessity of setting stab trim switches back to normal to solve the mistrim.
It's realy vile to me that this whole mistrim scenario was not thoroughly explored by the FAA and NTSB (independently of each other) in 737 MAX capable simulators following Lion Air 610. Very clearly the emergency AD was still inadequate months after Lion Air 610. Could ET302 have been prevented? Perhaps, but not based on the then published AD.
No, it wasn't. Overspeed was because the pilots basically firewalled the throttles and never once touched them. Look at the Lion Air flights, they never came close to those sorts of speeds.
In the case of ET302, the power settings were completely normal for the phase of flight they were in. What was abnormal was the trim. If the trim were normal, they would have had a normal climb and normal climb speed. On what basis would or should the pilots have made a power reduction?
In the case of LNI034 and LNI610, you're determining speed how? Do you have a page reference? Are you even able to estimate percent Vno? What I see for LNI610 is normal takeoff power, and just before midway through the flight a power reduction. Airspeed isn't affected. And how are you comparing the stabilizer trim setting value between LNI610 and ET302?
N1 was nearly at 100% for most of the flight. ET302 had an unreliable airspeed situation, yeah? My understanding is that the memory items for this on the 737 involves setting the throttles to well less than 100% (closer to 80-85% is what I've seen). Honestly I thought climb thrust was around 80% as well.
On what basis would or should the pilots have made a power reduction?
Both the overspeed clackers were going off for much of the flight (granted so was one of the stick shakers — at the same time).
In the case of LNI034 and LNI610, you're determining speed how?
The initial leak of the preliminary report included units with the graphs.
FAA emergency airworthyiness directive 2018-23-51 directly contradicts much of what you are saying and implying.
The PDF you cite, if authentic, and if the units are the same between LNI610 and ET302, indicate substantially more nose down trim for ET302. And that is consistent with the airspeed differences, not power.
Since you seem eager to accept more rope and hang yourself with it: ET302 05:41:15, take the airplane state at that time, and only do a power reduction, explain what you think will happen and why, in sequence with and emphasis on the force changes that happen including change in attitude.