I made no claim the pilot was manually controlling the airplane. Regardless, if the crash was caused by faulty instrumentation, systems or pilot input, he is ultimately in charge of controlling or correctly interpreting these things. Failure to do so and losing your plane defines pilot error.
Not so. If the primary cause is, say, a control cable to the tailplane snapping (or a critical instrument failure in IMC), that is not listed as pilot error, but a systems problem. In the Airbus case, the ‘control cable’ is an FCS computer and an electrical wire.