[asynchronous13]

I believe you're right that the truth is in the middle. It really points to the pilots being inadequately trained on this aircraft. Boeing strongly pushed to avoid requiring new pilot training for the MAX airplane. They claimed that MAX was similar enough to the previous version of the 737 that if a pilot were checked out on the previous plane they were good to go. What we're seeing now is that assessment was wrong. More training should have been required.

Boeing fucked up big time on this one. FAA also fucked up. Pilots were inadequately trained, and some delivered info was false (Boeing said MCAS could only bring the nose down 0.6 degrees, in fact, it was unbounded)

The MCAS system was designated "hazardous" by Boeing in their own safety assessment. A system that is labeled hazardous can not be reliant on a single system failure. MCAS is reliant on a single sensor. That's already a major error in the safety analyses. As we can clearly see from two accidents, MCAS system should have been designated "catastrophic", one step more dangerous in that scale, with even more stringent redundancy requirements.