I see it as every certificated Airline Transport Pilot is a pilot who passed the certification requirements, and any of them should be able to recover from recoverable scenarios, rather than fragmenting this certification into elite or specialist test pilots. The notion that a specialized test pilot or airplane certification pilot can recover from a unusual scenario cannot be used to justify impunging the qualification of any qualified pilot.

And that's basically the early Boeing rhetoric, and also from others like Langewiesche, talking about airmanship, the notion that some certified pilots really actually are incompetent they just so happen to be foreign pilots, etc. To whatever degree the average pilot is not getting the proper training, it's a call that the entire industry has an obligation to bring up the average pilot to the actual real world expected minimum level of competency, and stop this b.s. blaming of pilots as if there are different kinds of competencies for the same level of certification.

I further note, upon MCAS existence becoming public, U.S. based pilots got rather distinctly pissed off about being kept in the dark. That is not a reaction consistent with, yeah it'll be just like runaway trim, we can handle that, no big deal.