I came across this article on AF477 which makes fascinating reading and have copied a couple of key paragraphs.
"Loss of control typically occurs when pilots fail to recognize and correct a potentially dangerous situation, causing an aircraft to enter an unstable condition. Such incidents are typically triggered by unexpected, unusual events – often comprising multiple conditions that rarely occur together – that fall outside of the normal repertoire of pilot experience. For example, this might be a combination of unusual meteorological conditions, ambiguous readings or behavior from the technology, and pilot inexperience – any one or two of which might be okay, but altogether they can overwhelm a crew. Safety scientists describe this as the “Swiss cheese” model of failure, when the holes in organizational defenses line up in ways that had not been foreseen. These incidents require rapid interpretation and responses, and it is here that things can go wrong.
Commercial aircraft fly on autopilot for much of the time. For most pilots, automation usually ensures that operations stay well within safe, predictable limits. Pilots spend much of their time managing and monitoring, rather than actively flying, their aircraft.
Automation provides massive data-processing capacity and consistency of response. However, it can also interfere with pilots’ basic cycle of planning, doing, checking, and acting, which is fundamental to control and learning. If it results in less active monitoring and hands-on engagement, pilots’ situational awareness and capacity to improvise when faced with unexpected, unfamiliar events may decrease. This erosion may lie hidden until human intervention is required, for example when technology malfunctions or encounters conditions it doesn’t recognize and can’t process."
I'm not in a position to criticise the pilots and decide whether they are "competent" or not. In many cases trying to reengage the autopilot is probably a good idea as many things are made worse by manual intervention. It's interesting on the AF incident that even without the A/P on, the reckoning is that the plane would have kept going relatively flat and level, but trying to correct a small roll with a small joystick and not much controllability at high altitude and high speed created a worse condition. Loss of anti-stall functionality didn't help, nor other issues like the stall warning hooter dropping out due to lack of forward speed...
As I recall the second flight, the aircraft was trimmed nose down and the second pilot was finding it hard to keep the nose up with all that trim. So he tried something which didn't work.
Runaway trim as a single issue is almost certainly a lot easier to figure out and the trim motors get cut out if you pull against it normally, but not in MCAS. So one taught method was now not correct.
And yes, to a certain extent Boeing is supposed to be a mind reader to figure out design and software that makes sense, doesn't go against previous "rules" of flying a B737 and can recognise faults or put in place features which prevent it destroying the aircraft. All the actual things they did later were inherently quite sensible and you have to wonder how come no one thought of this during the design and review process. Or maybe they did but it was too costly or too late to modify it. But failure to modify MCAS before selling the aircraft cost Billions and hundreds of lives.
Not ensuring QA procedure to allow four piddly bolts to not be fitted - more billions, thankfully no one got sucked out, but that was a lot more luck than design. Failure at 35,000 ft with people actually seated next to the door - nothing would stop you going out that huge hole. Probably 5-15 people out the plane is my guess.
Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.