It's all smoke and mirrors.
Look at the state of the Emirate and its financial market. After the 2008 shock, they were on a relatively astonishing track back and this made them overconfident in the best middle eastern manner. There seems to be only one way, and it is the one "full forward".
Buy big and kill the rest, even if the yield erodes at a frightening pace. The big toy is said to make money, sure thing, but it makes less than necessary. The total yield declines year per year, but no one dares to correlate it to too big and fast an expansion.
The only remedy seems to be to double the bet and cling to the hope that if it will eventually win, has to win one day, and the reward will certainly cover the over-investment. Greetings from Arabtec!
The announcements of orders, the cancelation of others, the proclaimed interest in new ones, the request for upgrades of existing failures are all a big sign of complete loss of orientation. Not one of our manitous can admit to any retreat to smaller bagels and sings the boring same song of how well we're doing and how many more mammoths we will operate or what new wonders we would deploy if only the silly manufacturers would build them according to our sacred gurus' plans.
The way out would be to decrease the size of the outfit, but that is synonymous to failure in this region. Failure is most certainly the only outcome, but they'd rather have it the hard way and complete, with no way out, than the reasonable way with some kind of future.
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The 350-8 might be a good plan for a smaller EK, paired with the 77X-9. There would still be two manufacturers, not exposing you to high risk, there would be a 250+ seater for the less frequented routes and a 360+ seater for the higher density and ULR routes.
But who wants a smaller EK? Certainly not HH blinded by the "mine is bigger" syndrome, certainly not TC who desperately tries to immortalise his monument, and some of our drivers could hardly settle to fly less than 4 engines and a silly 5-ton shower ...