from the Seattle Times reference
The FAA's Bahrami insisted that the policy change has been crafted to work for all airplane manufacturers with no special treatment of Boeing.
Well there are regulations and then there are FAA ideas for acceptable compliance (policy).
If you want to relax the regulation then you need to put forth a reason for equivalent safety being provided and let the world see what you propose and comment.
OTOH if you realize that later on that your preferred method of compliance won't cut it, then you can change it and still show that you meet the intent of the rule. There are many subjective arguments to be made here and one does need to see both sides before forming a defensible opinion.
In my view there are plenty of safety experts around having to do with aircraft certification standards to weigh in on something in the public domain. So I'm not very interested in abreviated arguments cited in a news article.