Chasing short-term profits at the expense of long-term losses is a popular pastime of management/C-suite executives who are motivated more by "what's good for me" than by "what's good for my company/employees/customers". It creates a culture where everyone is acting more out of self-interest than they ought to.

Eventually, the company pays for it, but it can take a while.

The culture at Boeing has changed, and it seems to me that the quarterly numbers are more important now than previously.

>The fact that it wasn't a redesign means it builds off all the lessons learned over the 30+ years the 737 has been in service.

No, obviously it didn't, since the redesign changed the fundamental flight dynamics of the plane. It was not improving the design, it was piggybacking off the good record and past training of the old design to push out a fundamentally different product as quickly and cheaply as possible.

>Achieving sales figures doesn't preclude safety.

Then how did these fatal 737 MAXs ever get released in the first place?