Fly the damn airplane...
We can debate all day long about whether MCAS is a piece of crap, whether pilots should or should not have been given more information about it, etc., etc.
The overriding issue with both Lion Air and Ethiopean is why they could not manage the aircraft whereas, as it has been reported earlier in this thread (about 4,000 posts ago) that this same event happened at least five times with US carriers and they all managed to safely gain control of the aircraft and land safely.
The moment the aircraft lifted off in all of these situations they had an unreliable airspeed situation - disparity between airspeed indicators, the stick shaker active. The B737, like all airliners, have three independent altimeter, attitude indicators and airspeed indicators. A quick look at the other two or simply by asking the pilot not flying what his or her airspeed indicator says and comparing it to the standby would quickly isolate which one is unreliable. That is basic airmanship.
This is a textbook UAS event. It's a memory drill - flight directors off, autopilot off, auto throttle off, set an appropriate pitch/power setting for phase of flight. None of this was done. And, as I pointed out earlier, even if the Ethiopean crew thought it was a bona fide stall, you do not engage the autopilot. Period. Moreover, if the aircraft is indeed in a stall, why on earth would one raise a high lift device like the flaps and deepen the stall? Airmanship again. So even before the MCAS event, things were way off the rails.
When the flaps were up the MCAS activated. Having the nose pitch down without any manual input while manually flying the aircraft is a text book stab trim runaway. There is a memory checklist for that too which, among other things, calls for turning off the stab trim switches. And turning off the electrical stab trim kills any MCAS nose down trimming.
I know that it is harsh to criticize the pilots and all too often "pilot error" is the the go-to answer but these aircraft, as the US pilots demonstrated, were completely flyable if the crews simply did what they should have been trained to do yet not one of the memory drills was completed. Even if the airspeed unreliable drill was done and the power setting brought back from 94% to 80% while climbing then 75% when leveled off, the speed would have been such that manual hand wheel trim would have been possible even with MCAS active. This would have bought them lots of time to sort out the runaway trim despite not knowing the memory drill. As we know, the speed got way out-of-hand, past Vne, making manual trim with the hand wheel impossible.
I might be old school, but I believe that professional aviators are paid to know their stuff including knowing their emergency drills, particularly the ones that are memory items. They are memory items for a reason as the control of the aircraft is at stake as we have seen tragically demonstrated in these MAX accidents. Would we turn a blind eye to physicians not knowing how to do CPR? I think not nor should we shy away from criticizing pilots for not knowing two emergency drills designed to cope with situations just like this; hopefully the industry can learn from these accidents and put a lot of focus on pilot training and experience.