The danger of a discussion like this is that it quickly degenerates into tribal loyalties - in this case Airbus v Boeing. Full disclosure - I am an Airbus pilot and have been for the last 22 years. I had the opportunity to fly the 737 at the time and chose Airbus - just personal preference. Trying to stand back from this and take the big picture is hard as we do not have all the facts. What I do know as a Brit is that when the de Havilland Comet had 2 fatal crashes in the 1950's, the UK commercial jet market was destroyed just about overnight and Boeing won the world with the 707. Clearly vested interests came into play, but the undeniable fact was that square windows rather than round ones caused metal fatigue failures resulting in the loss of many lives. It got fixed, but no one wanted the revised product. The rest, as they say, is history.
Move now to the 737 MAX, which has had two fatal crashes caused by Boeing's failures at many levels - not least of which was to not tell the pilots that flew them about the existence of a critical safety feature in the form of MCAS. It also transpired that to save money it was only connected to one of three possible systems - something Airbus had had in place from the beginning back in the 80s. My observation would be that, rather than humbly deal with the issue, much very unhelpful talk has taken place within the US about how, 'this is all about terrible African pilots' and 'us Americans would never have that'. Rather than just say, 'we blew it' and just get on and sort it, some of the political rhetoric from uninformed people has been nothing short of embarrassing to an industry that should be above all that. That said, it transpired that Airbus's stall recovery training was woefully inadequate, as I discovered when I did my type rating back in 2001. The training at the time was not far from, 'Don't worry - the Airbus does not stall' and we moved on. This lack of adequate training and suitably qualified simulators contributed hugely to the Air France 447 A330 accident in 2009 and the Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501 A320 accident in 2014. Therefore Airbus has to have some degree of humility here - as I think they do. Most Airbus pilots who have been on the type for many years will have observed radical changes in training from when they first did the type rating to what happens now in both initial and recurrent training. Airbus has also been very fortunate not to lose aircraft under similar circumstances and, frankly, got lucky when the AoA probes froze up on a couple of occasions.
However, it is the 737 MAX that is in the glaring light of publicity right now and the optics are not good. Two fatal crashes and now a terrible bit of manufacturing/maintenance that should simply never have happened. The Airbus A320 Series NEO is already a mature product that requires virtually no extra training from a regular A320 CEO. It has been a seamless success in terms of entry into service. Unless Boeing do something very quickly to sort this mess out and restore confidence, their 737 MAX is well on the way to suffering the same fate as the Comet. Time is not on their side to do so.