I agree with the bold portion of your statement. To me, the accounts don’t seem conflicting at all. CA was distracted by the flap issue & lost SA. Got into an unusual attitude by fixating on EICAS/flap indicator. It doesn’t seem he was pitching down intentionally due to airspeed (which as mentioned earlier wouldn’t make sense, anyway), just altogether lost focus on pitch attitude.

FO notices the unusual flight path but is confused by the oddness of it & doesn’t immediately diagnose the problem correctly. (Assumes his instruments could be reading erroneously, or that the CA could be responding to something he isn’t seeing.) They’re IMC so disorientation exacerbates the problem. Ideally the FO would verbalize what he’s seeing immediately, but his response is not shocking considering what we know about stress & human factors.

Basically, distraction leads to loss of SA. The unexpected disruption while in IMC leads to confusion & a delay in clear communications. Scary stuff, but it’s a scary thing that could happen to any of us. Big takeaways for me are:

1. Don’t multitask in low altitude IMC. It only takes a couple seconds away from your instruments to lose orientation in the soup- even for the most experienced of us. Most things that might be grabbing your attention (like a flap overspeed) are far easier to deal with after the fact than is a CFIT.

2. Don’t assume the other guy knows what he’s doing. If you see something non-standard, verbalize what you’re seeing & let the other guy explain to you why it’s happening. If that means you end up looking like the knucklehead who wasn’t paying attention, see my conclusion to #1.