My point about force versus deflection is that the stick felt more like what we were used to. We trimmed off pressure not stick deflection. the thing only moved about 1/8 th inch.
Unless the 'bus springs are weird, it should take more "force" to move it further, so manually trimming off "pressure" should not be a big deal.
In my case, the jet commanded a left roll to counter the loss of right wing lifties and roll due to yaw. That sucker had lottsa drag. So I had to add more control surface deflection, and post-flight analysis indicated I had about a pound or two force to play with. In short, I basically held full left stick for about 10 or 15 minutes.
As other pilots point out, the ideal stick would require increased pressure/movement according to dynamic pressure. Just like old days when you could feel the forces on the control surfaces due to those air molecules. Go fast and stiff stick, slow down and stick gets mushy, as does the plane, duh.....
If the force feedback system fails, then you have the basic spring/torsion tube/whatever built into the thing. No big deal.
The problem with the 'bus is that a small continuous input from neutral eventually causes the HS to move ( ours didn't do this - it always wanted to get back to the manually set trim gee or trimmed AoA). The autotrim is neat when maintaining level flight or a climb/descent, as you can gradually relax pressure.movement to get the desired attitude or AoA.
However, in this case it helped the plane to achieve an ever-increasing AoA due to speed decay and the "one gee" default trimmed gee condition. Had the pilot used only roll and a neutral back stick, the THS would not have continued to command nose up.
Once zooming thru all the AoA protections with back stick, the plane entered uncharted territory and only a few folks would have understood the exact aerodynamic condition and need for manual down trim and forward pressure. Despite some folks' thots here, I don't think pure elevator can overcome the pitch moment that the HS can exert when fully deflected one way or the other when flying slow. Mach effects could have been a player initially, but once slow enough, they probably were not a significant factor.