I agree that long-experienced pilots would have been able to deal with this system going wrong. HOWEVER, there’s a lot of blame that accrues to Boeing as they did not treat the 737 MAX as a different airframe as the prior 737, so pilots certified on the prior could just plop themselves in the left seat and go — without having to learn of any new system that might shove the nose down on rare occasion. Arguably it was a different airframe; larger engines made repositioning the wings necessary, necessitating that ‘push nose down’ sensor/software/servos system so it would fly the same most of the time — which is fine so long as you make the pilots aware of the issue. They did not.

It’s not even clear that disabling that system was in the checklists, which is how everybody not just using ‘seat of the pants’ deals with things going wrong.

Then, they allowed sales of that model without a redundant sensor system, making the ‘base model’ a bit cheaper, but having a single point of failure in that system, making the failures much less rare. As far as I know, both of those crashed MAXs had a single sensor.

Disclaimer: I was a pilot for a goodly number of years, primarily in a Pitts Experimental (seat of pants) for fun, don’t consider myself any kind of expert on airliners — but I do believe in checklists.

I now have serious reservations about flying in anything made by Boeing. Frightening someone perfectly happy upside down in a biplane really took some doing. Congratulations, Boeing!