Waterpilot, can I assume from your handle that you are in fact a pilot?
but all pilots involved in the three incidents understood what was wrong, the just didn't know what was causing it.
If you are you would know that if the aircraft is out of trim a pilot
instinctively trims towards a more in trim pressure. The cause is not
relevant in maintaining control initially, simply trim as you were taught from lesson one of flying. When it starts to go "out of trim" again the pilot again would trim the other way. This is how they stayed in the air as long as they did. Given they had cautions from rotation they knew they were having a bad day in the office. Call for the trim runaway QRH or unreliable airspeed and keep the nose up and either fly level or climb.
A button that would have easily solved their problem (had they known about MCAS) had been disabled, leaving them having to figure out on the fly a "goldilocks" solution, turn off the electric trim immediately but not before using it to get back enough in trim to use the manual wheels, but not for too long or MCAS will reactivate (as it did.)
The manual electric trim switch would have "easily solved" their initial control problem.
I am not trying to jump on the crew again here, they were faced with all the cacophony of alerts etc but trimming is so fundamental to hand flying that it needs restating that perhaps they do not hand fly enough to gain trim "feel".