Beyond all of our mental exercises here and elswere on this sad siutiona, there is benefit in the process of exploring such things.

The process and use of your navigation tools has materiality. How you use your chart(plotter), what your proceedures are on watch, what the autopilot is set to do, how you handle alarms that would have alerted the off watch crew, etc. ARE USEFUL discussions that have some transferability.

In the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole wide world is fast asleep...your rolling proceedure of monitoring what's going on helps keep one situationaly aware AND awake. How you use the act of setting, and then adjusting, a route makes a difference. Using an autopilot in which mode makes a difference (and I suggest, in this case, can cost lives). Etc., etc.

It is foolish to believe our speculations are dispositive on determining what "really" happened. If my communications here have seemed dismissive, I apologize for my syntax -- I may disagree, but I don't intend to disagreeable.

Like others among us, I've come close to hitting fixed objects that I should have known were there; and, in some cases I didn't use the tools available to me properly (or I had my fat face in the instrument instead into the wind looking and listening ;^)))) )