It’s a far bigger deal than made out to be. The aircraft was in an extreme situation that required a CFIT recovery. Passing through 1500 feet the aircraft was descending at greater than 142 feet per second. They were less than 12 seconds from impact. The nose attitude reached over 15 degrees nose down. A normal decent rarely exceeds 5. During flap retraction aircraft attitude is reduced to 10 to 12 degrees nose up from 15 to 17 initially. Instead of lowering the nose about 5 degrees they allowed the nose to fall over 30 degrees!
They in fact had lost control of the aircraft. The how and why is basically covered in the report. The only thing that prevented a tragedy was a near perfect CFIT recovery by the crew. Normal flap retraction from a flaps 20 takeoff is to go to flaps 5. With the copilot selecting 15 the maximum flaps extend speed did not increase as the Captain expected. He focused on that issue and lost control of the attitude of the aircraft. The copilot should have questioned his perceived hearing of flaps 15 since that is not the normal retraction sequence. Both pilots should have been monitoring aircraft attitude, aircraft, vertical rate and airspeed.
Given the startle factor and uncertainty of what exactly was happening the CFIT recovery appears to be almost remarkable in how well it was executed. It stopped a disaster.