Your summary is exactly right. And as an avionics engineer I can say this design never should’ve made it past peer review and safety analysis. A number of people should lose their careers over that design. We will see if that happens.
I did not work on the MAX but I know people who did. I worked on the NG and that model has a great safety record.
As a retired airline pilot, I’m quite interested in the pitch problems that required automated inputs to control. Most all swept wing aircraft nowadays require yaw-dampeners that prevent “Dutch-roll” tendencies that activate automatically. This sounds like a similar system, except it counters unwanted pitch sensitivity caused by low-slung high-powered jet engines, particularly at high (take-off) power-settings.
In the US where airline pilots are both highly experienced and extremely well trained, there have been no such desasters in many years of MAX operations
I suspect you are correct on this. This is beyond a software patch or a training manual update.