This seems a bit absurd.
1) most ships can't sustain their "top speed" unless they are in 100% ideal conditions.
Sort of crazy in hind sight. Keep in mind that the California was twenty miles ahead of where the Titanic struck the ice and was in the middle of the ice flow and stopped for the night. The Carpathia was fifty miles behind the Titanic and traveling slowy because of ice. Between the two the area was clear of ice. Thats seventy or eighty miles of calm flat sea with no known reports of ice. Add to that the desire of the owners to beat their sister ship Olympic on the transatlantic run. One of the owners was on board at the time so there was a lot of pressure to make history. They did, just not the kind they expected.
There were so many factors that lead to the sinking of Titanic that you can't really pin it on one cause. If I may give you some examples.
There was no accurate way to track the ice flows back then, The only way to know there was ice was if someone spotted it and reported it. Someone had to hear the report and the average broadcast range of most radio sets at the time was 80 miles. Titanic had the newest Ship to Shore radio and could broadcast a little over thousand miles if weather conditions allowed and it was broken most of Saturday and Sunday. When I say broken I mean it could receive any message within range but could not send more than 80 miles.
The Steel used to build the ship was not mixed c.orrectly, too much sulfur, causing it to be more brittle in the cold water.
The binoculars used by the lookouts was locked up and no one could find the key since they left port. The key was in someone's pocket back in the UK.
The Ship to Shore radio broke and the radio operators spent the better part of a day fixing it.
This caused a backlog of out going messages the operators were hired to send for the passengers and did not have time to pass six ice warnings up to the bridge. The last ice warning came around 5PM and the captain gave the course and speed for the night based on that warning. Captain Smith checked the conditons before going to bed around 10PM and made no changes, but left orders that if there were any changes in conditions to notify him immediately.
The Titanic had a very strong bow. If when they sighted the iceberg they had done the wrong thing such as hit it head on there is evidence that the ship would have survived. The evidence is sonar images taken of the bow at the bottom of the sea. It had hit the sea floor doing close to 56 miles an hour and though deformed was still intact.
There was also a problem with the rivets. Some were not as strong as they were supposed to be due to high sulfur content. From imaging, and testing back in the 90's it looks as though instead of a huge gash of three hundred feet the berg sheared off a few key rivets causing the hull plating to pop open letting in more water than if there were a gash. They did confirm a 22 foot gash on the side of the ship.
There were enough lifeboats for 1200 or so people yet people were afraid to leave Titanic till it was too late. The first lifeboat could hold 63 people but only took 20 or so. I am doing this from memory so my numbers are not exact. Only the last few lifeboats went out full the rest were less than half full. So they could have saved 1200 or maybe even 1300 people instead only 705 survived.
Windy conditions that day caused them to suspend the lifeboad drill that was scheduled for Sundy the 14th. It was too cold to have the passengers out on the weather decks.
So yes, they were traveling fast but for the known conditions they were not reckless. We sit back 90 years later and ask how could they be so stupid! Looking at it from their point of view things were a little different.
This part was the thing that facinated me the most. The steam ship California got the blame for not responding to Titanic's SOS. It was said they sat and watched Titanic sink too afraid to go through the ice and save people. It was discovered in the early 90's that this was not true. In fact there was a ship that was between Titanic and California. A Norwiegen fishing vessle had been poaching and was heading home with its catch. The California saw that ship thinking it was Titanic, but Titanic was over the horizon, Titanic saw the ship and the only ship that was reported in the area was California so they got the blame. Only when ships logs were being transcribed to computer media did anyone find out about this other ship. It as ten miles from Titanic and when it saw the destress rockets and left the area for fear of being reported. Though smaller than Titanic they could have taken on most of the people that died that night for transfer to other ships later that day.
At the time it was not mandatory to have 24 hour radio operations, The California's one radio man went to sleep at 11PM 40 minutes before the Titanic struck the berg.
These examples are off the top of my head there are many more issues that sealed the fate of Titanic.