Even if it was the crew's error, no (undocumented) system should be designed to rely on "a memory item" to stop a fatal dive.
I think that thou dost not understand the point of an emergency checklist. They're not for routine use, they're for, you know, when things aren't working right.
Nor do they understand WHY there are such things as "memory items".
Yes, these are things the pilots are supposed to know, cold. As in no thinking, no puzzling, just doing. And furthermore, I think it is very reasonably, very very reasonable, to expect that pilots are, when confronted with a strange situation, to be able to do some aerodynamic reasoning of their own
AFTER having completed the memory items and checked them with the emergency checklist. This is what pilots call "airmanship." So far, it's looking like the pilots of these two aircraft did not demonstrate such airmanship, and that is tragic.
However, I definitely have sympathy for flooby's point that no system should rely on a memory item to stop a fatal dive. I think that is essentially true. The electronic systems should be designed to avoid emergencies, not casually drop pilots into emergencies and expect pilots to fly their way out of them. If they designed stuff that way, then the "defense in depth" benefit of having astute pilots is lost, since you are relying on that as your first line of defense, not your last.
That said, I still find all these people saying that MAX is fatally flawed, that the aircraft is unstable in normal flight, that the 737 should not have been revamped once more, that the idea of MCAS is inherently bad and dangerous, that MCAS is shit, etc rather absurd -- at least very much premature given what we know. Instead, I think the evidence is coming in that MCAS has a correctable design flaw. We will see how many people suspected that design flaw and signed off on it anyway. But fundamentally, it looks like bad engineering judgment was involved (what we used to call "a mistake") and that mistake will be corrected.
None of that makes it less tragic that so many people have died. And it will be doubly tragic if it turns out this is because Boeing engineers made a mistake that had previously been made by someone else. And triply so, if they did in knowingly. But none of that is established at this point.