Stick pushers aren't anything new, and the sad irony is that except for the two tragedies, MCAS worked so well that in the thousands of flight hours the Max had, no pilot had even noticed it.
It absolutely was the fault of the engineers who failed to realize what would happen with an AOA fault. I'd love to be corrected, I don't believe a single email from the engineers to management telling them would would happen was ever dug up. And, there's never been an engineer whistleblower saying "I warned them."
Has a single PE lost their license over the Max?