This reminds me a lot of the Colgan crash & 1500 hour rule. Each side of the argument seemed to be arguing past each other. To the side that blames the pilots:

It's easy to assume American pilots are better airmen. While overall I do think we have more pilots who are better at hand flying, we absolutely have our share of pilots who would have a rough day flying a plane without an AP. We also have plenty of crashes in our history caused by pilot error. Very few airplane crashes are blamed solely on the pilots. Even crashes that were largely caused by piloting mistakes often result in procedure changes, new regulations, or even new design standards. Our industry is supposed to be error-tolerant, not error-proof. The only thing similar to an MCAS failure I can think of is an engine failure at V1. Both of those require very specific procedures to be followed in a short period of time or the aircraft ends up in an uncontrollable state. As a result, we put a lot of emphasis on practicing V1 cuts, have a lot of certification standards associated with a V1 cut, and our takeoff profile is built around that failure. Despite all of the attention we place on this, people still screw it up in training. Is it really that surprising that some pilots will mishandle an equally difficult failure that we barely train for?

And even if pilots were 100% to blame, you would have to ignore the horrible culture and decision-making processes at Boeing that these accidents uncovered. There is lot's of blame to go around for these accidents. The pilots messed up, but so did Boeing.