Given some of the things that are drifting around about the relationship(s) between Boeing and the FAA I'll expand a little bit on my post up thread:
First and foremost is you are dealing with a bureaucracy with both the FAA and Boeing which means that the amount of engineering (design, manufacturing, and operations) is a very small part of the whole organization. As I noted before the FAA is very top heavy with careerists who mostly came up from the legal or administrative side, not the actual aircraft or operations side, who have no clue as to what's happening on the flight line, the hangar or the factory floor. Not helping things is the fact that given the lack of incentives they can't get the most qualified people working for them, I'm not talking here about pay and benefits but a new hire engineer is going to be sent to a desk job approving new coffee cup designs, etc. for at least 5+ years, then might get to work a little bit in the field inspections for a while, then sent off to some mid level administrative posting, and then after they've forgotten all of their design stuff they learned in school they finally get to be part of a design review team. Unfortunately the only real source of people with the understanding of the "Real World"is with greater Boeing and Airbus( including all of their suppliers and subcontractors) or the DOD for parts of the metal issues. Given the choice almost all of the best and brightest are heading for the private sector where they're very likely to get a chance to work on something exciting in a couple of years which actually means something.
As I noted before there is a great disconnect between the newer pilots (for me it's mates and engineers) and their equipment. There's is so much automation to save us from ourselves and enforce a standard
to avoid a theoretical issue that happens every millennium that the newbies don't have a clue on how to tell when Uncle Auto is pitching a fit and then what to do next and when they figure it out then well....
Bottom line is that somebody needs to regulate things but unfortunately once you get the lawyers and bunglecrats involved the idea of KISS ( Keep It Simple Stupid) is completely out the window and things get so complicated and messed up nobody can sort out the mess and the regulators and companies are trying to fix the blame first (even different parts of the same organization) and then the problem second.