@ Safety Concerns: No one has contested that.
Automation has brought us the blessings of ACAS, GPWS, Cat3 and so forth. The one little setback, and these discussed incidents point in that direction, is that with every progress there are new problems arising. If we deal with them properly, then it's real progress. If we try to cover up the shortcomings, then we devaluate it.
There is no question that envelope protection is a great progress. The moment however that one of these features supposedly lead to aggravating a situation (almost proven on QF72, suspected on the NZ incident) and the involved parties display a reluctance to engage fully, from that moment you get some pros suspicious.
A pilot wanting to pull on a yoke/stick and the aircraft not willing to follow his command, for whatever reason, shows a situation that SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED. It should be engaged with adequate measures, not only explained and discarded as extremely remote and therefore claiming the system beeing safe enough.
I truly hope most of my fellow pros would agree on that.
@Dysag
You are not entirely correct. When in manual on a 777, you actuate on the Actuator Control Electronics, they transmit to the Primary Flight Computers, these send back the signal which is executed by the ACEs.
If the envelope control protection in the PFCs intervene, you will feel resistance, BUT with a little force you can actuate the ACEs directly and therefore override any possibly erroneous input by a PFC.
That is the huge difference in both fly by wire systems. Such a feature would have worked on QF72.