I've been a private pilot for years and I'm an emergency doctor with an interest in human factors.
Surely, there is a basic design flaw in a system which hands the aircraft back to the pilot in an emergency in one of a number of different control modes, all of which have different levels of protection and response to control inputs. The pilot, already stressed and faced with an emergency situation, cannot fly the aircraft automatically, but has to devote much of his higher cognitive function to trying to remember what he should and shouldn't be doing in this particular mode and what happens with different control deflections. For responses to be automatic and instinctive in this kind of situation, where there are so many different variables, seems to me like it would require a frequency of recurrent training and a level of basic handling skill which may be untenable.
Aircraft need to be designed to be flown by idiots, because some day one will.