It'll be interesting to me to see if a full investigation gets performed of this. I'm not sure under what circumstances that happens, given an experimental one-off craft in international waters. Just retrieving bits of it is inordinately expensive, compared to, say, an airplane crash.
On the silliness-factor above- that's bound to come. And one of the issues they look at in these kind of investigations is corporate attitudes and culture.
However, so far, there's just been a whole lot of rehashing of a limited amount of information, so a lot of things get blown out of proportion. Another example is that video game controller, which, it appears, had zero to do with the incident.
The people at the surface might have been aware that the sub had potentially (or even "probably") imploded very early on. But either it did or it didn't, and they couldn't just give up and go home because "maybe it imploded". If it did, there was nothing they could to do help anyone, and if not, time was of the essence, so they proceeded accordingly. I suspect the surface searches were also looking for debris as well as the whole sub. Come to think of it, why didn't those foam floats rise to the surface? And what kind of foam can you even use for that pressure?