Re press reports: As I said in my post, I’m no aeronautic expert.
If you’ve got some 737 pilot acquaintances, please share what they’ve said.
Believe me I have done that... repeatedly, and been shouted down repeatedly. Let me paraphrase one more time... The 737 MAX vertical stabilizer trim system was altered and this should have been passed on to pilots in a better way, but the 3rd world airlines and their inadequately trained pilots were still responsible for the crashes.
These modern airliners practically fly themselves from point a to point b. The pilots are there largely to verify the systems are working correctly and intervene on the very rare occasion when there is a malfunction. The problem with this is that pilots become so insulated from actually flying the plane that their skills and gut/butt level understanding of what it means to fly an aircraft can sometimes get rusty. In the case of 3rd world pilots they often have very low hours outside of simulators and never developed much in the way of butt level flying skills to begin with.