Yeah, agreed, it makes intuitive sense and also neatly fits an emotional "finance bad" story, but shouldn't we then also expect the 787 to have similar problems? Or, why would the 787 with its entirely new airframe exist in the first place? As an outside observer with no particular knowledge of the industry it at least seems like Boeing was able to produce a high quality new plane more than a decade after the 1997 merger.
The claim isn’t exactly “Boeing can’t make a good plane anymore”, though.
It’s more like non-engineering culture resulted in a push to create a new plane as quickly and cheaply as possible. In other words, the execs at the start of the process created an impossible task that the downstream employees couldn’t follow through on. In this sense, it is consistent that under “normal” conditions, Boeing could still produce a good plane; the problem is that nobody wants to or is able to enforce those conditions.
