With the Qantas incident, they had something like 146 msgs appear on the screen spread over about 5 or 6 pages. So they were forcibly distracted from solving the problem from a top-down approach to having to investigate and cancel each of the 146 msgs, and that was why the two extra pilots were such a godsend, they were able to help out.
Yes, a message flood is also a failure of UX. At my place of work, when a flood of errors occur, we throttle and batch the errors so that the admin doesn't get thousands of emails.
Given that user interfaces on airplanes are digital now, there are a lot of opportunities to innovate.
For instance, where there are multiple failures and alarms, it might be better for the panel to continuously replay the sequence in which the alarms were set off, more or less like how movies do it to help the viewer understand what is happening on the computer. By showing how a system is failing through time, it shows a causal relationship. In addition, you can provide drill down capabilities.
In the case of Air France, perhaps it could have illustrated the AoA through time, and the flight velocity. Perhaps that would have explained something to the pilot.
Messages are prioritized on the screens in the cockpit in any aircraft I've ever seen. Higher priority messages are near the top and are a different color.
There are lots of messages because lots of things can go wrong with an aircraft. They aren't all critical "land now" messages, but may be relevant.
