The problem is the 737 Max was hustled quickly to market to beat airbus and especially to offer a "drop in replacement" to existing earlier generation 737. Boeing would have definitely lost market share if they hadn't gotten their plane out then.
Choosing technical debt involves economic logic for today's marketplace. I suspect the real problem is companies wind-up deluded by their choice - to hustle the 737 Max to market, Boeing had to pretend is wasn't a, uh, piece of crap. Or not a piece of crap but a terrible mix of high tech and low compromises. And this pretending had to go through the whole enterprise. The marching order couldn't be "we'll add few more stiches on this Frankstein and hope the guts don't spill out", they had to be "this will be one more product of Boeing excellence" and everyone either believes or acts like they do. and this situation, combined with the huge investment involved, makes cutting losses very hard.
#notallMBAs, but the surest way for your product to fail on the market is for your company to go bankrupt before you’ve polished it enough.
In this specific case it was about greed, but sometimes MBAs push for release, because according to the engineering teams the product is never truly perfect
Product people and engineers know how to manage time probably better than business because they are doing the work.
If something fails because it doesn't meet the market there are numerous reasons for that besides not hitting the date.
A good product, that hits the date, can still fail due to market timing or market movement and many other things. Whether a project is launched at a certain date has little bearing on the success of that project long term, short term it might meet marketing and financial quarterly goals, but long term success is always better when it is a good product, and for it to be a good product the people that make products and create value should determine or at least have some say when it is complete and ready.
People forget a project was late if it succeeds, they never forget a project on time that failed because it was rushed, buggy and not polished production.
MBA/business and marketing need to go back to letting the product people and engineers create value, then they can extract the value and sell it. It is much easier to sell value of a good product, it basically sells itself. For some reason American business has completely forgotten the rule this millennia, product then marketing and selling.
You see this same thing happen at game companies when they put a date out there and it is driven by management and marketing over reality of engineering/product/design that makes a fun and solid game.
Boeing was greatly diminished in engineering/product excellence by the McDonnell Douglas management control takeover, everything newly produced since has the tell of this.