What proper training? Boeing deliberately decided not to document the new behavior, and the entire point of MCAS was to avoid needing new pilot training.

Sounds like your pilot neighbor is just a bigot.

What was the training? From what I read the plane was sold as being flown without the need for new training to counter the Airbus jet?

Our club has few professional pilots and iirc their more or less shared opinion was that boeing fucked up, but the expectation was that pilots training should have prevented the crashes. Regardless of Airbus, Boeing expectation still is that pilots can fly with minimum automation, and if something is wrong / odd they know how to disable it all, take full control, gain altitude and figure things out.

iirc the proper course of action for this failure condition was to perform manual cutoff of the stabilizer trim, which is considered a mandatory memory item for flying even normal Boeing 737s (non max)

basically, on runway stabilizer events, you must know to turn off the autopilot: https://www.johanpercherin.info/airline-pilot-training/boein...

apparently the differences in training have resulted in the lack of knowledge in this area for foreign pilots, which turned a recoverable failure into an irrecoverable one

disclosure I'm just going from memory from reading about 737 max analysis, there might be more to it than thi

Edit: as expected the situation is more nuanced, see here for elaboration on why even successfully performing stab trim cutoff may not have been sufficient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769100