The A400M went to Airbus because of the company's then-justified reputatio for on-cost, on-time deliovery of programmes ... That was earned by the predecessors of one Noel Forgeard, whose qualifications for the job included being an "industrial adviser" to top politicians and, in the words of his biographer (paraphrased) his long-standing ambition to run a large company before he was 40 (he had missed his self-imposed deadline by 3 years).
His failure to manage the A380 programme in sufficient depth (or back the relatively inexperienced programme manager he put onto the A380) resulted in the mismatch between Catia versions across the programme and the problems we all know about, and which seem to be still not fully solved.
On THIS thread, he also reckoned that CASA could handle something bigger than their products to date, but also failed to allot enough design resources ... Recovering from the "Catia mismatch" on the A380 and his insistence on retaining the "traditional Airbus twin-aisle" fuselage width for the A350 needed vast amounts of design engineering time which could have been available for the A400M.
What his "expert input" to the power plant decision was, Gornose, but as it seems to have been political, what's one to suspect ??? P&W Canada had a suitable-sounding contender (but no hardware), but politics prevailed. Forgeard was, as we know, eventually unseated (with loads of dosh, but also many a law-suit over his head), and his successors and their teams of engineers are even now still hard at work to recover from one man's overweening ambition.
I'm sure they will get the A400M "right" ...
One can feel like shooting the pianist, but don't let's take an AK47 to the whole orchestra ...
"The evil that men do lives after them" ... and it's left to the good 'uns to tidy up afterwards.