Experience and aeronautical decision making skills cannot be taught nor gained in training classes and limited simulator sessions alone. The First Officer on this flight served only as a distraction in the cockpit. The sterile cockpit rule was grossly violated by this crew and the auto-pilot was in use when it should not have been , the flight crew was without doubt suffering from fatigue and in the case of the First Officer fear of her lack of experience. We all know she should not have been in that aircraft with such limited experience. Her words on the transcipt detail the problem with regional airline hiring practices. The Q400 and other large turboprop aircraft of its type are not the appropriate place to build flight time and experience. Why not? Because of the large number of innocent lives of the unaware victims carried in the passenger cabin.The FAA can reduce accidents like this by simply mandating higher pilot experience levels, expecially in the right seat. An experienced, skilled, professional FO is the ultimate cockpit resource available to the Captain, not the auto-pilot.

You are totally correct in your comments. The Captain is the ruler of the ship and it is the fault of the captain if anything goes wrong. Having said that I feel the need to address the issue of fatigue and lack of sleep. A good captain would have called in sick, knowing that it might end their career with that airline company. The company that fired such a captain would have been losing a good captain. With todays emphasis on pleasing the stockholder and screwing the passenger this is only going to happen over and over again.
The old school pilots would give up the job rather than kill the passengers, never have thought a moment about it, just tell the airline they needed more sleep, and if the airline could not wrap their minds around that they could just find a new ( unskilled, willing to kill the passengers rather than admit they where tired ) pilot.