It may be a little thought provoking to think about the issues from the side of the aircraft systems designers. It is very expensive to meet an assurance level at DAL A and also automate the handling of every conceivable circumstance and failure and perhaps create some heuristic approach for failures and circumstances that are not foreseen. So instead, the approach has been for the automatics to 'gracefully'
degrade and hand the bag of bolts to the flight crew. The flight crew are expected to be able to manually recover in the degraded/alternate state from any of the potential issues that the automatics cannot. Unfortunately, as instances quoted in this thread attest to, on some occasions the flight crew are not up to picking up the pieces when the aircraft systems peremptorily hand them control and simultaneously enter some degraded mode/alternate law. Indeed, just the complexity of managing the aircraft in its degraded mode/alternate law is sufficiently challenging for some crews.
Then there is the imaginative (mis)use of capabilities that the analysts, software designer and the certification testers did not expect: the systems equivalent of using a fire-extinguisher to hold open a fire door
. Users will always do this with systems and they own them, but the capability that they are fulfilling with a particular function was unintended or perhaps being used outside its intended purpose, and consequently can lead to unintended consequences and exhibit 'features' that can/will catch out the unwary.
The crews that the analysts designed for 15 or 20 years ago when the design was finalized are now taking pensions (and commenting on here) and the expected capabilities and awareness of the aircraft are completely different now than they were. A lot more thought needs to be given to the human factors of the systems what was useful in the old days may be an irritant now and vice versa.