SLF attorney reaching into aviation-related law - plus a custom disclaimer of anything like full understanding of the flight control dynamics being discussed.
But as to what Boeing engineering and management cadres might have known, it's true that a federal criminal inquiry still is open and underway, isn't it? And in pre-trial discovery in the direct liability cases as well as a number of related cases, there is a very large amount of factual information yet to be uncovered. The pertinent Committee of the House of Representatives released a not insignificant batch of documents some months ago, but it is hardly the complete picture. So whether Boeing just never thought about a particular flight control situation, or instead and more troubling, thought about it but tried to hide the ball, still is an unknown.
As for the lack of training initiatives by Ethiopia after the Lion Air accident . . . while the factual predicate of that point might be correct, did any of the other 737 MAX customers initiate such training after Lion Air? Again I'm not asserting support for either content of the prelim report or for any specific iteration of how those pilots responded or did not respond - but there's something quite starkly "hindsight, purely" about noting a lack of new training initiated, let alone a grounding by the operater