2) Widely reported that this may have been an issue from the onset.
Schedule pressures are hardly new on an aircraft cert - every day delay in getting Type Cert costs the airframer millions of dollars/euros, so they tend to pay attention to that stuff.
When Boeing became a delegated authority, Boeing and the FAA jointly negotiated a document the governed the process. It's huge (well over 1,000 pages and regularly updated) and governs everything from what can be delegated (and what can't be) to standard flow times for how long the FAA has to approve or reject a cert submittal. A new aircraft is a massive program, with thousands of interrelated tasks - knowing flow times is critical to putting together a schedule.
One of my biggest complaints with the FAA was that they routinely ignored the assigned flow times - reviews (approvals) that were supposed to happen in two weeks often took months. One of the things that went into our work performance review was meeting out schedule commitments - and it was hugely frustrating to bust my butt to make a cert submittal on time, only to have it sit in some FAA in basket while I missed my certification due dates.
No first hand knowledge here, but my suspicion is that much of this reported schedule pressure was simply Boeing insisting that the feds meet the flow times that they'd previously agreed to.