There's a lot more to that onion than the American press presents that can't be discussed here...or the American press, for that matter. The English version of Der Spiegel had some great articles a couple of months after the fact.

Germany is not alone in having tragic incidents like this either. (FedEx 705, anyone? Stanford alum AND US Navy trained/psych eval-ed)

Pretty sure that the ab initio training and flight skills weren't the problem.

(Not advocating ab initio....it is a threat to collective bargaining. Fortunately, US airlines aren't about to put down a penny more for training costs than absolutely necessary before the robots take over. Just throwing it out there.)