Actually they must use the worst pilots. If they use average pilots that means 50% of the pilots might be out of their depth flying that plane. What kind of insanity is this?
I don't think there is actual data on skill variance among professional airline pilots so I rather they just force testing on groups which are statistically more significant to get into crashes.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/newly...
The point of the test flight is to push the plane as far as it will go. Practically all drivers, regardless of skill level, will lose control if you have them hydroplane a car. Race drivers will not. With a couple advanced driving classes suddenly most people will be able to handle a slide much better. There's a gap in experience, not talent. There is no such gap between any two normal drivers.
It's more akin to the reasonable person test in law. Meaning, a reasonably well trained pilot that is not considered significantly more expert than those around him or her.
Suppose you make a proposition to a person and they reject it based on some fallacious argument. You, an intellectual, kindly point out the fallacy in their objection. A reasonable person is one who takes this in and reconsiders your proposition. An unreasonable person is someone who doubles down and either offers different but equally fallacious arguments (if they just hate your proposition and are looking for an excuse to reject it, but wish to conceal that) or refuses to acknowledge their original fallacy (due to embarrassment, stupidity, or perversity).
"Hey, we need someone of your skill level to come in and fly some test planes"
"...okay"
The Max needs to ensure that 80% ("average" is too low a standard) of tested pilots recover the plane.
The other 20% take remedial classes.
The main problems from my limited understanding were: pilots didn't know the subsystem existed; they didn't know it had activated; they didn't know what it was doing; they didn't know how to turn it off.
Additional instrumentation could have addressed all these issues but would have been more expensive than what they actually did.
I'm into synthesizers, which run the gamut from bleep-bloop toys to movie-soundtrack in a box.
Mostly, synths are marketed like 'Not only can the Omnicron Neutron Wrangler produce any sound imaginable, it can produce more of them more loudly than the competition and audiences will surely be impressed by your mastery of its mind-bogglingly vast control surface.'
But the synths which end up being well-loved classics are not the ones with the biggest range or the most controls, they're ones with a decent range which is designed and calibrated well enough that it's hard to get a bad sound out of it - meaning they don't have too many abrupt phase transitions or nonlinear feedback loops that could cause you to suddenly lose control and turn an interesting complex tone into noisy garbage.
The well-loved classics you describe sound more like making a plane that's aerodynamically hard to lose control of... which is kind of a holy grail, but the MCAS design came after all of that was fixed by earlier design decisions.