@Owain
Thanks for your response, in retrospect my comment was generated as a result of total frustration at the technical level of responses, from a "flight controls engineer", particularly the dismissive treatment of the Airbus to NTSB document, which I thought could encourage an interesting discourse about at least one aspect of Airbus FBW.
The A320 certification was a huge workload for the certification office staff as well as the specialist staff from the design office and flight test.
The A320 was my favorite of all the transport category jets of that generation that I flew. I often commented that, at medium altitude, in direct law it was a "nicer" handling aircraft than the B734 with all systems operating normally.
Nick and I were both keen sailors and planned to meet on a Fijian island after early retirement. The plan was to spend some serious time covering the really difficult areas of the certification and the behind the scenes horse trading over the many items that required at least tacit agreement before certification special condition were developed. All to be done over a bottle of red or two. Sadly it never happened.