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It’s probably easy to find a subset of airlines that would work for either airline.

But that RyanAir didn’t happen to have a version of the design that was extremely unsafe doesn’t mean that the family of planes is safer than the competition. It just means that it got lucky that it didn’t have the flawed planes.

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it's by design, Ryanair never buys from the factory AFAIK. They buy secondhand, they are basically scalpers of the second hand market, always on the lookout for a good deal.

That mitigates the risk of buying untested tech with first-iteration demons

That's the complete opposite of reality. Ryanair only buy new from Boeing (often being the largest customer - the MAX 8 200 being designed specifically for their needs) and have the youngest fleet of any major.

Yeah, this used to be Ryanair's thing, and they had a motley collection of weird old 737s, but they're very much all new these days.

Even that's not true. Following a meeting with Herb Kelleher, when then-CFO O'Leary became CEO in January 1994, the airline ordered its first Boeing 737s direct from Boeing and has never flown a second-hand aircraft since (unless you include the Airbus A320s from the Lauda acquisition).

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