Regarding the SeattleTimes article of today:
No matter how these messages are interpreted, they clearly show that the Chief Technical Pilot (and "Vince") considered the possibility that MCAS was running rampant and trimming like crazy.
Now Boeing's defense is basically that their 737-MAX simulator was of the same low engineering quality as the actual plane, and therefore it's results could not be trusted as it was producing other errors unrelated to MCAS. Fair enough, I can believe that, but it does not make their actions look any better.
Does it really matter if the error in the sim was caused by MCAS or not, when the symptoms led Forkner (and others) to believe that MCAS was running rampant? This should have been enough for a risk analysis of MCAS that would have found the single point of failure and prevented the accidents. To make matters even worse for Boeing, these messages and therefore MCAS concerns, were known before the second crash.