That line right there is essentially the same response I had for the Langewiesche's piece. It is not an excuse to pawn off the accountability for a catastrophic loss to the pilot when even the basic design is as fraught with failures to deliver even basic sanity checks as the MCAS system was. Make no mistake either, the issues that were found were basic. FMEA was not performed once, but never updated because it wasn't legally required, nor was a full fault-tree enumerated or kept consistent through the system's lifetime. Either of which would have forced a consideration of what would happen in the event of a sensor failure. Furthermore, the overall architecture of the flight computer failed to comply with design requirements that require no single point-of-failure which would have been revealed by doing what amounts to a textbook case of "what is the worst conceivable bit flip that could possibly happen right now?"

This is one of the few points I tend to respectfully differ from WalterBright on. I don't give a damn if every pilot were a Chuck Yaeger or Sully clone. That plane was dangerous by design.

A dangerous plane flown by a Good pilot is still a dangerous plane. There is no place in something manufactured to be deployed in a careless or cavalier manner, and the MAX rollout checks every box for organizational negligence in my book.

I'll let blame rest with the pilot in so much measure as it is do, but a machine that will actively frustrate its operator, while endangering the lives of everyone using it is a machine whose place is in a scrapyard; not in the sky.