These are not equivalent issues - we have market forces pressuring Boeing to keep the cost down versus Boeing pressuring an airline to not train its pilots as it thought was warranted.

It is a simple fact that training is part of the total cost of ownership of an airplane, and so it is to be expected that it will be an issue in negotiating the price an airline is willing to pay for them, or whether to go with a different airplane.

In a responsible or well-regulated industry, responding to these sorts of issues (which are ubiquitous), through a reduction of safety standards, is supposed to be off the table. What Boeing was doing here was apparently part of a larger campaign to subvert this principle by hiding any hint of a safety concern.