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Also there's the "sales/business people made the problem worse" angle as well that developers just love.

But there's also risk in designing a whole new plane, which had been Boeing's original plan. I'm not convinced MCAS is the wrong engineering decision. And who's to say a new plane wouldn't have a similar type of pilot assist system... the trend is in that direction.

Ok but the implicit assumption here is that a new design would not itself include all sorts of engineering trade offs between systems, maintenance, and pilot training, when in fact it would. The 787 was a ground-up new design and yet holds the distinction of the most recent previous instance of a full model grounding, over battery issues.

Iterating on a proven airframe has a lot of advantages for aircraft design and it is common in the industry.