radken, assuming that 'the bare airframe' refers to flying the Max without MCAS - predicted to be rare situations, then the piloting task is to manage the small parts of the flight envelope with reduced stability margin, and presumably all flight conditions with manual trim.
The latter, no trim, situation might not apply if the revised design and system switching enables reinstating the trim - note reported difficulties in following procedures after the last public sim evaluations.
The notion of an 'average pilot' is misleading; the acceptability for flight is a judgement based on agreed certification requirements - but words can be interpret differently. This might be at the root of the FAA's problem with other regulators - the FAA interpreted standards (failure case) in comparison with other worldly interpretations. Perhaps similar to abilities as imagined vs ability in reality - false interpretation of accidents occurring in different parts of the world equating to piloting standards, and not differentiating normal, abnormal operations, nor MCAS failure after training.
This thread is about AMS and Rad Alt failure and alerting, similar issues as with MCAS. These problem issues are in the assumptions and interpretation of the wording of regulations and piloting capability. The AMS accident indicated that the FAA / Boeing viewpoint did not have sufficient safety margin in real situations (Dekker report); thus if this design thinking was continued in the MAX, most likely, then the MAX failure case may also lack sufficient safety margin.