The Fix
Talking of cartoons, there used to be a famous one of a designer looking out of his window at a smoking wreck and sighing “Oh well - back to the drawing board!”
I guess he worked for a British company. American companies have no culture of redesigning from the ground up - they stick with what they have. The thing is, to find the “Fix”. Once you have found the fix you can move on.
If you ever looked at the convoluted system of rods, cams and threaded adjusters on a DC-8 or 9 cockpit sliding window, you can almost follow the brain waves of the designer as he he searches for the fix for the fix for...
If, as a few have suggested way back before this long delay, MCAS had been replaced by a revised trim feel mechanism, the manual trim wheel by a backup power driven system, and if more redundancy were built into the AoA system, I am guessing we would all have a better feeling about the Max. But no - we have to find the fix for what we have. A redesign would take too long.
Now maybe the British designer in the cartoon didn’t do so well as his company eventually failed. On the other hand...