When the airbus reverts to direct law, it is an airplane again, just like the DC-9 (I'm old Northwest, too).
The problem Air France had was that bad data from frozen pitot/static sensors drove the autothrust and normal law protections the wrong way.
I'd like to think I would sense the deck angle, check the ground speed on the data/gps page, determine my airspeed input is wrong, disable the automation, and recover from the stall in the middle of the night over the middle of the ocean in thunderstorms. I'm ready to face that challenge now, with help from the Air France experience.
The airbus method does a lot for you, but you always need to be ready to turn off the magic and fly the airplane. When you turn off the automation, she'll do anything a DC-9 would do.