Gums - I for one appreciate your well reasoned and clearly presented thoughts. I hope you don't spend too much time in that cave or that if it does it includes a means to connect to PPRUNE often to share your insights.
Your last post included a reference that has long been a touchy one for me. FWB literally means Fly-By-Wire. We most often presume that to be an electrical wire, but if you extend "wire" to also include mechanical cable then our commercial fleets have been FBW for a long time! My real point, however, is that FBW and Augmented are not one and the same. If I take a mechanical linkage from pilot stick to elevator and replace it with an electrical sensor that measures stick position, a wire that transmits that stick position to an elevator actuator, and an elevator actuator that responds to electrical inputs I have FBW, but I do not have an augmented control system. The augmentation part is where the system uses other inputs besides pilot stick position to determine where to put the elevator.
The 777 is a good example of both simple FBW and complex control augmentation. For it's pitch axis the 777 in its full-up Normal Mode provides considerable augmentation to increase stability, compensate for configuration and thrust changes, and include envelope protection to aid the pilot in keeping angle-of-attack and speed within normal ranges. In the lateral axis the 777 essentially provides proportional gearing from the pilot's wheel to the various wing surfaces used to command roll. 777 also has Bank Angle Protection that works by directly moving the pilot's wheel, but the linkage from wheel to wing surface does not involve any augmentation. In its back up (Secondary/Direct) modes the 777 essentially provides direct pilot controller to surface gearing in all axes.
Those of you who strapped themselves into birds like the Viper were the real pioneers of fully augmented flight with lots of trust in the systems and hopefully an ejection seat that you never had to call upon. Building on that foundation we now see more and more augmentation being used in commercial transport control systems. There is certainly room and need for sound judgement as to how those systems are designed, validated, verified, trained, and maintained. One of the biggest challenges is determining what the limits should be as to how much we are willing to employ augmentation to make up for less than desirable open loop handling characteristics.
Back down off my soap box for now,
FCeng84