But it’s not a real defense for the Max because the problem with the Max is that Boeing has shifted a lot of the work from hardware to software.

This defense only punts the ball a few yards because the question now is why Boeing chose to shift a lot of the reliability from hardware, which this defense admits is better engineered, to software, which it admits is almost intrinsically worse.

If anything, this defense leads to the conclusion that the Max is an intrinsically unsafer plane, because it has shifted far more of the burden to software which is an intrinsically worse engineering discipline.

If it was just a matter of the software QA being rushed then the additional time gained by the grounding of the planes could solve the problem. But if it is software engineering itself which is the problem then no additional time will help unless it leads to shifting some of the burden of safely flying the plane from software to hardware, which doesn’t even appear to be an option Boeing has considered.