"FBW and automation are two separate concepts."
Thank you for trying to make this clear, including your other post:
http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/51974...ml#post7960740
This is very commonly misunderstood. In the book "The Rio/Paris Crash: Air France 447" by Roger Rapoport, he frequently confuses the two concepts -- and that in a book dedicated to analyzing that crash!
It is exactly as you said: envelope protection and automation (whether autopilot or FMS) are two different things.
You can have automation without envelope protection, as was typical for years. Likewise you can have envelope protection without automation -- you could manually hand-fly an Airbus and never engage any autoflight system.
In some cases there is a loose connection between the two. On Airbus, autothrust may automatically engage to protect alpha floor. Likewise in cases like AF 447 an anomalous event can simultaneously disengage both autopilot and envelope protection. However they are two different things, coincidentally connected by the same event.
Admittedly the aerospace community does not universally adhere to this distinction in terminology. NASA refers to the space shuttle's fly-by-wire system as a "digital autopilot", even when being hand flown.