Cargun
As a probationary annonymous Ppruner or not your blood red post above directed at Rainboe does a good job of highlighting some fundamental diiferences in opinions that some of us have about causal factors in this and many accidents.
Perhaps oversimplifying it, but the questions seems to boil down to
'what good is automation if it's not perfect and leads to a crash"?
Burried in rainboes and others words was the hint that automation in total saves lives.
In order for automation to be effective it has to anticipate failure conditions and make choices of what is the safer condition (FMEA stuff). Clearly these choices were approved as viable once certified. Unless you have access to the full Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) used to certify the functionality of the equipment you can not fault the design that it made less safe choices.
And once again I say that the FMEA design choices do consider that the average crew will detect and accomodate minor failure conditions for the specfic flight conditions encountered.
What Boeing is saying at this time (my read of their letter) is to remind crews of this presumption. If it turns out that a "lesson learned" is that an average crew may not be presumed to be able to handle this than you can expect a removal of the automation or a design change.
Now I'll stand down for a bit and see how the rest of you feel about this.