Those regulatory incentives are there for a reason. They are written in blood for the most part.

It's one thing to scoff and believe "Oh, it's nothing! You're just holding us all back!"...

...Right up until a plane load of freight or people plunges out of the sky.

Free market economics optimizes for one thing, and one thing only as a first,order optimization. That's why we regulate. To ensure that all those nuisance secondary facets are accounted by everyone equally to ensure that market forces natural race to the bottom doesn't compromise the central tenet of air safety; that everyone and everything that goes up, comes back down, safely, controlled, and alive.

The business part, if you think about it, is secondary to the capability to make and safely deploy a new plane. A nice bonus.

Sacrificing the quality of the final product for the sake of looking better on the balance sheets us a cardinal sin. Plain and simple. Based on testimony from inside, that sin seems to be SOP at Boeing for the better part of the last decade.

I think this sort of excuse is always superficially applicable and therefore meaningless. There is no malfeasance that can't be described as "a rational response to perverse regulatory incentives", but "rational" falsely implies a singular possibility chosen objectively. It's incorrect to defend a specific failure as being compelled, because one hasn't explained why this failure and not the near-infinite number of other possible ones.