No, bill, it would not be crazy, because collapse of a single floor (a.k.a. pancaking of that floor) is a possible cause of general collapse. Indeed there were partial collapses of floors in the WTC. Read again and this time
try to actually understand the words:
Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.
(Yet again, that quote is from
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm, just in case someone missed it.)
Hilited the key words for you. What is
crazy instead, however, is to claim that...
merely based on NIST's use of ellipsis
WP on the word "initiation" after "collapse" because it was (for the normal reader) assumed by the context.
ETA: Not to mention David Lim's sentence that "You could
almost feel the sound of the floors pancaking on top of each other as they were collapsing"
[ref]. What kind of "explosions" could possibly be "almost felt" from
within the building?