This guy has a dedicated shipping channel. I know that sounds like his channel should be about anime or something but no, I mean as in like actual ships. He did this video which shows the GPS track of the ship before the accident:
While we're all speculating, I think my earliest guess about what happened is wrong. Earlier, I said:
Sped up like this it makes it really easy to see what happened - after the ship recovered from the first power failure, it started really laying on the engines to correct course - that's why all the smoke. But then it lost power again, and the correction became an overcorrection. By the time the power came back the second time it was really too late, they tried to correct again in the other direction but just didn't have the room anymore.
We don't know a WHOLE lot more now than we did this morning, but we know a couple of small things, and they and the possibilities the video guy brings up have completely changed my mind. In the livestream video, when the power comes back on the first time, there's a bunch of black smoke coming out of the ship's stack, and I THOUGHT this meant they got the engine restarted and were pushing it hard to prevent the collision but I don't think that's true anymore - I think the smoke was just from the emergency electrical generators coming on. I think once the power cut that first time they never got the actual engine restarted at all. When you look at the GPS track, you can see the ship is going perfectly straight right up until the power failure, and at that point the ship just starts slowly nosing to the right and keeps doing that right up until the end. It doesn't look like they were ever able to apply any corrective steering at any point, even after the lights came back on. In the last few seconds before the ship hits, on the livestream video you see it start to turn the other direction but apparently that wasn't because of steering, that happened because the ship dropped an anchor on that side in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the crash.
If the lights going out the first time shows the engine dying and the ship is never able to regain propulsion or steering control again after that moment, that explains why the ship just drifted right like that.