When you are in senior management, you make decisions based on their overall effect on the company's financial health or future growth. That is your job, just like it is the engineer's job to make decisions based on overall safety and reliability or future capability.

The debate, or perhaps the proof, is what happens next. Every decision, engineering or management, needs to be evaluated post implementation to evaluate its effectiveness. Are we better off financially? Are we more capable? Is this system more reliable? Is this system easier to change while continuing to validate it is meeting its design goals?

Both management and engineering resist having their decisions "colored" by their negative impact from the "other" group. Engineers don't like it when their clearly correct decision is overridden by management's feeling it doesn't make "business" sense (which is usually code for it reduces margins unacceptably). And management doesn't like it when their decision is negated by engineering telling them it will cause their products to become unacceptably unreliable or unsafe.

In a properly functioning company it is the role of executive management to combine both the needs of engineering and the needs of the business into an effective outcome that everyone can live with and keeps the company alive.

Articles on the acquisition suggest that Boeing acquired MD both because the industry was consolidating and because MD was making more money per plane than Boeing was. They wanted both the customer base of MD and the "DNA" or managerial understanding of how to build planes that were more profitable. Here in hindsight the implication is that the additional profit margin came from skimping on safety and reliability engineering.

At some point, there was no doubt a review on the 737-MAX, where the engineering teams raised concerns about MCAS and the impact on safety and reliability. And the costs associated with addressing those concerns were also discussed, both cost to implement and time to market costs. The result of that review was to pursue certification on their plan of record and to not incur the additional certification and time to market costs that engineering advocated were needed.

That decision was explicitly the pursuit of profit margin at the expense of product safety and reliability. As human lives are transitively related to safety and reliability of the aircraft, it is a reasonable statement to make about pursuing profit at the expense of human lives. That is what the equations reduce to.