Lemurian:
Easier to criticise out of spite, prejudice, ignorance...
To be fair, in the early days Ziegler and Airbus did kind of set themselves up for that kind of backlash. Pilots tending to be a proud bunch, if you build an aircraft that you claim your maid could fly then some will definitely get sniffy. If they'd angled the promotion from the outset as "We've built an aircraft that's there to help you do your job to the best of your ability", which is pretty much what they said later, then I wonder if the kneejerk reaction would have been as prevalent. Having studied under one of the professors whose job it was to translate the pilots' requests into software I *know* that they went out of their way to make the A320 and its later sisters as pilot-friendly as possible.
It's a shame that it was so advanced that they didn't have the now ubiquitous car technologies of traction control and the like to compare it to at the time, because while not 100% accurate it is the best analogy I can think of.