Originally Posted by
rog747
So in a nutshell, it seems MCAS was a newly formatted super duper safety thing for the new Maxed out MAX to prevent a stall, ...
Actually, that doesn't quite seem to be the case. From the reported characteristics (speed of trimming, limited authority, etc.) it's nowhere near what i would consider a stall prevention device - either a pusher on older types or full authority FBW on newer; what is seems to be doing is providing more scope for the existing stall recovery procedure to be successful on the newer 737s, trying to avoid a case where the stab is inadvertently (or automatically?) trimmed too nose-up approaching the stall, where the nose-up trim (possibly combined with high thrust levels) then makes the pitch down to recover from the stall more questionable.
As such it presumably had a relatively low
perceived design criticality, since it isn't "essential" to most stall recoveries, and maybe not truly for any. That may have led to a relatively simple - perhaps too simple - design concept in terms of sensor architecture and dependencies (all armed with 20/20 hindsight, of course)