We aren't only arguing about how much money is going to have to be spent, we're arguing about how the money is going to come from shareholders, or customers, or passengers, or the tax payer.
If you think this isn't an argument about money and who pays, I think you misunderstand why we are here.
There is no other reason we are here, than money. An unwillingness to incur cost, or cause customers to incur cost, that made other choices of provider more attractive drove Boeing to make decisions which now will cost money, to them, to the customer, and probably to everyone else at large.
Boeing is not in pursuit of the "best" fix, its in pursuit of the "least worst (in cost terms) fix"
Boeing looks more lika a petulant child that got caught cheating on their chores. That then got caught cheating on those same chores enough times in the same day, that their parents needed to get a chair and watch them complete them.
Tangentially, I believe the root cause of all software architecture debates is an argument over who pays what aspect of cost.
Language goals such as expressivity, readability, brevity, composability; and features such as static typing; and patterns such as monoliths and microservices, ship-fast-fix-later, agile and waterfall design, centralized vs distributed; and aphorisms such as DRY and YAGNI - can be evaluated in the framework of shifting cost between original programmer, future maintainer, service provider, service user, or library/module reuser (and one individual may assume all of those roles at different points in the software’s lifecycle!).
Well yea, I guess the underlying trueism is that "its turtles all the way down" in all things. We like to act like over-arching things (safety) weigh higher, and so we speak like the decision to go for safety isn't an economic decision, but in truth, it always is.
Free software has costs, so its not like FOSS is outside this loop either.
Once you start modelling everything in cost/benefit terms, it all gets a bit odd. I think "because I want to" looses out.
But in Aircraft design, and regulatory oversight, I think we might want to shift the knobs on the control box a bit.
While I agree there are some very hard trade offs that we have to make along all of those axes, I do also think there times when people aren't being ... thoughtful and you end up with situations that are far off the pareto frontier.
> There is no other reason we are here, than money.
Various articles indicate that competitive pressure and trying to speed up development of a competitive alternative was also a cause for this. A new airplane would've required more work to get it certified. Making the changes under an existing type certification saves a lot of time.
Possibly a more engineering focussed company would've developed an alternative much earlier than when Boeing finally woke up.
If you think this isn't an argument about money and who pays, I think you misunderstand why we are here.
There is no other reason we are here, than money. An unwillingness to incur cost, or cause customers to incur cost, that made other choices of provider more attractive drove Boeing to make decisions which now will cost money, to them, to the customer, and probably to everyone else at large.
Boeing is not in pursuit of the "best" fix, its in pursuit of the "least worst (in cost terms) fix"