Unfortunately it seems like Boeing went into this with their eyes wide open. They knew exactly what would happen and they probably had a good idea of how many times it would happen. Their assumption (hope) which they have stated often was that the pilots could handle the failure, which is a pretty strange approach to safety design in my opinion. (How would they feel about "we don't need a circuit breaker in the under seat electrical outlets because the flight attendants are well trained to deal with fires"?)
Thanks for the link to the Challenger disaster, I never knew that the engineers had actually discussed the gasket problem with NASA and were pressured into approving the flight. There is probably nothing worse than knowing exactly why the rocket blew up well before anybody else and wondering why you didn't just argue harder. The same for the Boeing engineers. I feel for them both, but it is an object lesson in why you should never give in to management when they want you to compromise safety -- and they will. There is always some other job that you can do rather than being complicit, and if it goes that far then you didn't want to work there anyway.