[PaulHoule]

The thing is all the other major airliners today (even made in Brazil!) have fly-by-wire and a "flight envelope protection" system which is like MCAS but more comprehensive, better thought through, documented, etc. That is, pilots are trained in the system and a huge amount of effort went into thinking through how the system should behave when it is in a degraded condition and some parts of the system (like those sensors) aren't functioning properly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_envelope_protection

[masklinn]

Well yes, the problems of MCAS are not that it exists (although its implementation was definitely debatable, notably the use of a single AoA sensor, and AoA sensor warnings being optional), having FBW and flight envelope correction is not an issue in and of itself.

The issues of MCAS was that it was added specifically to hide type behavioural differences with previous 737s with the specific goal of keeping the type, and thus the entire purpose of MCAS precluded training pilots on its behaviour and edge cases.

[mcv]

Basically it was to maintain a lie. The illusion that it was the same plane as older models. They needed it in order to pretend there was no change, but that also meant they couldn't teach pilots about this new system interfering with the plane's flight behaviour.