gums - no doubt the 737MAX with AOA failed high presented a confusing situation. My understanding is that stick shaker went off as soon as they lifted off and first took to the air. MCAS did not start its thing until they went flaps up. I don't know if standard operating procedures would have been to recognize something is not right when stick shaker commenced right away and would not quit when they were clearly not near stall. If they had gone around the pattern and landed without going fully flaps up they never would have encountered MCAS. I certainly cut the crew some slack - they had clearly more skin in the game than any of us and were doing the best they could to make it home. I have less slack to offer the crew from the day before who flew their full flight with the stick shaker going off, activated the stabilizer cutout to shutdown the misbehaving stabilizer control, and did not (from what I have seen) communicate all of that well enough to those who sat in Row 0 the next day. Hind sight is 20/20, but that airplane should not have gone out with passengers on Oct 29th.
In your last sentence above did you intent to state "737 Max without MCAS" rather than "737 Max with MCAS"? I assume that your question to me is with regard to the characteristics without MCAS. Without MCAS, starting from a trimmed state at a normal condition for a revenue flight I don't think that a pull-up maneuver to higher AOA will get you to the point where you have to push to keep AOA from increasing. The issue that MCAS mitigates is finding any point along the way where AOA can continue to increase at the current level of column pull and thus requires that the column pull be relaxed in order to keep to the desired AOA.
Regards,
FCeng84