Pilot performance is the result not the cause of the system.
I don't think I'm saying anything different here. There are many important lessons that have come out of these tragic accidents if we choose to look at the entire confluence of events, yet around these parts there seems to be a myopic focus on just a few areas.
Part and parcel with the development of transport aircraft is the creation of training, certification, and operational guidelines for all the people who touch that airframe. I would submit that just as Boeing cut corners with the physical design of the MAX, they and their willing partners in the form of the airline operators have conspired to cut corners in other areas as well. It would clearly be a crime to let someone to either perform maintenance or operate the flight controls on an aircraft for which they were not qualified. So how should we evaluate a case in which those people were given something short of adequate training to perform their duties? We fix the planes but we don't fix the process surround the operation and maintenance of those aircraft?
I think it would be uncontroversial to say that pilot training and certification standards have been lowered over the past few decades. And yet when there is evidence that an operator such as Ethiopian is not even living up to those lower standards, is there not cause for concern? We know problems like this also occur on the maintenance side as airlines continually seek to lower their labor costs, so when it becomes apparent that someone at Lion Air failed to adequately diagnose and repair a faulty AOA sensor, do we just shrug our collective shoulders? Or do we have a peek under the hood there as well?
As I have stated multiple times before, the MAX will eventually be fixed or grounded permanently (the former more likely than the latter), but if all the other issues that these accidents have brought to the fore are not addressed as well, then we are just setting the stage for the next tragedy. That strike me as both a terrible waste and a great disservice to those who perished.