People falling out the sky because the wing falls off because someone forgot to bolt it on aren’t going to care if it’s a design issue or a manufacturing issue. Boeing is doing both, so the blame lies with them either way.
Boing is still at fault, yes, but we should exercise restraint in becoming too reductionistic on complicated engineering problems.
There's no nuance when people are dying. None whatsoever.
If someone can't agree to that sort of black-and-white thinking, probably they should be working in an industry where innocent lives aren't dependent upon sound decision-making.
You might really enjoy a book called the The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. He covers your comment here in detail.
One of his key insights is that "human error" are far too often weasel words that prematurely end a conversation (or investigation) into root cause. He goes on to detail a whole tree of "human error" so we can speak about mistakes, lapses, and errors that humans make.
The meat of his point is that some types of human error are very hard to design out of your system, but _many_ types of human error can and should be expected by the designer (or engineer), and appropriately handled.
In this instance, if a human (or perhaps a few) can make a single error when affixing the door plug to the aircraft, like improperly torquing a bolt. And that simple error risks a catastrophic loss of the airframe, then you probably have a _design_ issue and not a "manufacturing issue caused by human error".
There isn't a change in outcome between the flaws, but I think the difference between a mistake and a known issue that was left in while the company tried to change regulations to allow it, all for a tiny cut to the BOM, is worth noting.
This is of course pure speculation and it might equally well be some single manufacturer pressuring ("optimizing") their employees (or even machines) past the point of reliability.
Either way I'm not gonna fault anyone for refusing to fly on a 737 MAX. At some point you gotta make a call and shift your assumption from "isolated engineering/manufacturing mishap" to "corporate screwed the entire product top to bottom".
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/boeing-737-max-loses-e...
So Boeing didn’t actually manufacture the plane. But they are still responsible for ensuring its manufactured correctly.