Good-frigging grief,
Doze!
But "conventional" feel is only a de facto snapshot in time - it doesn't automatically follow that what's considered conventional now will be conventional in a few decades.
[Editorial comment: Cockpit layout something for another thread, IMHO. My friend was the captain of the Cali disaster, and the stoopid FMS had duplicate designations for a fix. The two of them realized that somethig was awry when the coupled-autopilot turned the wrong way, but continued their descent after correcting their course. Can talk about that tragedy someplace else.]
Conventional "feel" is what airplanes let you know when the pilot or "system" commands a change in flight path or rate of descent or.....
The basic laws of aerodynamics dictate the response of any disturbance from the trimmed condition. Too fast, then jet wants to climb. Too slow, then jet wants to nose over. It's an AoA function unless the FBW system laws get in the way.
As
Doze has reminded me in finitum, our primitive FBW system in the Viper was just that - primitive, simple, etc. It also was a mix of AoA and gee command ( uncorrected for pitch attitude). Control law reversion was really simple - if air data went FUBAR, then the "standby gains" were used and the system used one of two values for control surface deflection and some body rates. AoA still ruled. We never had "direct law" unless in the "deep stall". We never had THS, but the jet tried to get to the trimmed gee if we relaxed pressure on the stick. If the trimmed gee got us to the AoA limit, then the thing followed the AoA limit until airspeed was high enough to get back to the gee command.
The biggest thing for we pilots was that the thing "felt" like what we all had flown for years. Slow, then the thing wanted to nose down. Fast, then it wanted to nose up. We had no change in stick force, but relaxing pressure showed you where the jet wanted to go, and holding a stoopid back stick pressure when at a high pitch attitude and slowing down fast resulted in what happened to AF447.