Beagle, while deferring to your much greater and more recent experience than mine, I strongly feel that the need to "divert engineering resources" was due to decisions (later regretted) taken under the disastrous regime of one politically skilled but industrially inexperienced gentleman, highly compensated on his accelerated retirement, from which Airbus is still recovering. If - and it's a Big IF - things had gone to the usual plan, the A400 would have occupied engineers' minds after the A380 moved into service, to be followed by the A350. But under Mr. F's rule, the unwise decision was taken to retain the original Airbus wide-body fuselage cross-section, which had a Zinc Zeppelin reception from potential customers, ILFC in the forefront. Whence the collision of two programmes, which Airbus had avoided until then, and apparently less than perfect integration of the CASA operation.
You're right, things are being sorted out, both organisationally and on the engineering side, but it's clearly a long haul to recover from inexperience and possibly lack of ability to cooperate with different nationalities' characteristics at the "Top".
Like you, I look forward to hearing that things are getting sorted, and that the enforced delays will be shorter than the pessimists think - perhaps the A400 will actually reach the places where it's needed before our forces finish their work in Afghanistan ... Any penalties could possibly be recovered from what Mr. F was paid on leaving - and which Paris is trying to prise out of him (like the ex-Top Man at RBS in UK).
Incidentally, I noticed an odd remark by Mr. Enders recently, that the A380 engineering virtual mock-up was suffering from "problems with gravity" - could it be that the cable looms are straight lines on the computer screens, but the real life "dangle effect" is (was?) not allowed for?. Bright young engineers might not realise that electricity grid and telephone wires don't go straight from pole/pylon to pole.
