Why so few clues about missing Malaysia flight?

Many people are wondering why there are so few clues about the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, beginning with the lack of a distress call.
This lack of a call, however, is not particularly perplexing. An aviator's priorities are to maintain control of the airplane above all else. An emergency could easily consume 100% of a crew's efforts. To an airline pilot, the absence of radio calls to personnel on the ground that could do little to help the immediate situation is no surprise.
This investigation may face many parallels to Air France 447, an Airbus A330 that crashed in an area beyond radar coverage in the ocean north of Brazil in June 2009. Like the Air France plane, the Malaysia Airlines aircraft was a state-of-the-art, fly-by-wire airplane (a Boeing 777) with an excellent safety record.
The Air France flight's string of events was precipitated by onboard faults that were automatically transmitted to the airline's headquarters during its final minutes. While they lacked any flight parameters, these maintenance fault messages gave key clues, though not a definitive cause of that accident, before any wreckage was found.
The recovery of the Malaysia aircraft's flight data and cockpit voice recorders would be important in determining the cause of the accident.
Flight 370's route heading north from Kuala Lumpur was over sparsely populated and heavily forested mountainous areas of Malaysia and the Gulf of Thailand.
Reports of a possible course reversal observed on radar could be the result of intentional crew actions but not necessarily. During Air France 447's 3½-minute descent to the Atlantic Ocean, it too changed its heading by more than 180 degrees, but it was an unintentional side effect as the crew struggled to gain control of the airplane.

The visual search for any pieces of the airplane that may be floating or visible through dense jungle is under way and indeed a daunting task.
In the case of the Air France plane, it was five days of intensive searching before the first floating wreckage was found. It took nearly two years to locate the remains of the aircraft on the ocean floor 12,000 feet below, broken into thousands of pieces by the impact with the water.
In contrast, the Gulf of Thailand has a maximum depth of only 260 feet, with the average being about 150 feet. If the aircraft is in the water, it should make recovery easier than the long and expensive effort to bring up key parts of the Air France plane from the 2½-mile deep ocean, where most of the airplane and many of its victims remain.
Read news in full 10/03/14 Bill Palmer/CNN