Without any real insight, my hunch is the FAA did that because they are probably too strapped/underfunded to do the proper due diligence. It’s tough to know enough about multiple complex airframes enough to ferret our interaction failures so they defer to the teams that supposedly do know enough... which creates an inherent conflict of interest.

It will be interesting to see how regulators treat autonomous vehicles. I have a feeling they will defer to the existing recall mechanism rather than completely grounding a fleet