I believe that is false, as MCAS should (when correctly implemented) only apply at the edge of the flight envelope and those airworthiness requirements are all related to normal regimes. I can't find anything supporting your understanding
No MCAS = does not meet the criteria to be employed in Civil Air Transport in the United States.
There were several failures on the system architecture front as well, including a vulnerability to single event upset, where a cosmic ray flipping a single bit in the FC in vommand would trigger an MCAS failure state that the average civil aviation trained pilot was found not to be able to successfully cope with.
It's also in the NTSB and FAA final reports, as well as several House generated investigations.
I spent waaaay too many hours doing that math by hand and looking up crap on Engineering Toolbox to easily forget/forgive that.
If by "different handling" we mean "not airworthy", I wouldn't say the design is fine.