MCAS is a red herring here. It is a red herring because it is not automation. It is a fly-by-wire feature to help human pilots to fly manually. It doesn't work when the Max autopilot is engaged. In fact I recall that one of the crash crews tried to engage the autopilot because they knew, or believed, it would correct the trim problem.
For the purposes of this thread the 737 Max crashes were caused by faulty angle-of-attack data which amongst other things gave incorrect speed data. I can't remember exactly whether anyone said the autopilots could have coped with the sensor failures. I believe the autopilot tripped out when selected in the relevant crash but that the cause was the excessive misconfiguration ie things had gone too far.. If autopilots had been used from the very first possible moment they may have been able to avoid the two crashes.
If that were true it would make an interesting case for enhanced use of automation. Even if it were not true then I suspect you wouldn't need a huge change to the software to make it cope with sensor failure.
The argument I am making is not whether computers should fly planes rather than pilots. My point is simply Boeing have suffered massively and they might well feel they could easily get into the same situation again. They have to make things more sophisticated (ie complicated) to make progress. You can therefore imagine why a spin of the strategy wheel could end up pointing at backing automation and leaving pilots behind. That would have been wild speculation until we found out this week that Airbus have spent two years making something like 450 flights in a big A350. Imagine the cost of that. You can only think momentum is building up.