As I understand it, the 737 MAX issue was not because the pilots didn't know how their plane worked, but because they were lied to about a feature that was installed to try to reduce costs. Had they been told it was there, no the outcomes could well have been different.

That is correct. They weren't trained appropriately on how to handle the incorrect AoA scalars they were receiving but reacted as if they were correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610#investigat...

Although the pilots cannot be blamed for not understanding the undocumented controls of the 737, one (multiple?) incident(s) were mitigated due to very experienced pilots understanding the fundamentals of the plane. Think of the pilot knowledge as a second line of defense, against an incident that should have never happened (again - not the pilots fault, but the additional knowledge helped).

I recommend reading “Flying Blind” for more detailed accounts of the precursor lion air flight that almost crashed.

Not sure I understand your point. I read "it's not that they did not know how to disable the feature, it's just that they were not told how to disable the feature".

Or are you saying that they knew, but somehow did not do it?

They were literally never told such a thing exists and it can be turned off. So they tried what they can without touching it to no avail.

I know. My original point was that it is not completely clear that pilots know better how planes work than software engineers know how computers work.

Not at all saying that they were incompetent. On the contrary, passenger planes today are IMO much more complex than one desktop computer loading a web page: passenger planes are a group of many computers doing safety-critical stuff in order to maintain a giant machine up in the air.

I don't see how one can say that software engineers don't really understand computers, but pilots do really understand planes.

Plus - FAA and Boeing + contractors did too much high level abstraction.

If I recall correctly, the crew of the Ethiopian flight that crashed were very experienced and they did understand what was happening. They just couldn't mitigate it in the short time they had.

Note that my point was not that the crew was inexperienced or incompetent. My point was that those flying machines are crazy complex, and actually made of tons of safety-critical computers.

I just did not find it fair to say "pilots know how planes really work, but software engineers don't know how computers really work". Both are waaaay too complex for one person to actually understand fully.

I don't think that most pilots do know how a plane work, they know the fly theory of course.