Re: "forcing the nose down against the pilot's mistaken reaction to a stall"
Please, explain what's wrong in my post.... do you really believe the Airbus shouldn't have gone to alternate mode and the autopilot should have kept on flying the plane with incorrect Pitot data?
Or that pilots not trained in the new Max flying characteristics don't risk to stall it without the MCAS? It's different explicitly disabling it, or having it and then it disables and the pilot has to start piloting the plane in a different way.
Beware that the Max can keep on *increasing* the AOA with the same stick input - the pilot is required to decrease stick input to keep the same AOA - which may be not "instinctive" - especially when busy performing a take off and following a SID procedure, or landing, maybe in bad weather.
The fact that the MCAS was ill-designed doesn't mean that without it the airplane is safer.
There are two big risks - automation that hinders pilots to control the plane in the proper way, and automation that properly disables forcing pilots to take control - and not everybody does always the right thing.
These two accidents are exactly an example of each.