It's starting to seem like the plane is not safe to fly without that option (and potentially some other changes that haven't been finalized yet). I'm surprised; I thought that the "nothing at the expense of safety" ethos was still followed in the airplane industry.

> How can something that important be an option?

Based on other comments here and in other discussions, it seems like adding that feature would increase the training requirements for the pilots since it is an additional instrument in the cockpit. I don't know whether it was Boeing, Boeing's customers, or both who pushed for the instrument to be an option. Any combination is plausible, and I'm not going to rush to judgement like a couple of my sibling commenters just because it's the fun and popular thing to do.

Makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

Basically everything about this plane boils down to "it should require more training but it didn't"