That was but one of many options, all with pros and cons. It does appear that there is a bit of room to move the gear attachment point outward. Internal stuff

That was but one of many options, all with pros and cons. It does appear that there is a bit of room to move the gear attachment point outward. Internal stuff might need to be relocated. A very nice solution is to fold the landing gear as the B52 bomber does, asymmetrically with one in front of the other. Internal stuff almost certainly would need to be moved around, and then doors would be required. The doors would probably fit, unlike on the original, so that would be a nice upgrade. Boeing did add some fancy stuff (on the 737MAX-10 only) to lengthen the gear right before lifting into the air and then unlengthen it as it gets retracted. The nice thing about this choice is that there need not be any changes to the height of airport equipment unless the fancy mechanism wasn't used for the nose gear. So that helps: food/maid truck, fuel truck, baggage truck, jetway or airstairs, etc. Another option is to keep the aircraft low. This of course makes it much harder to increase the frontal area of the engines while keeping the aircraft with a pair of under-wing podded engines. We can imagine playing with the definition of "engine", installing units that have pairs of side-by-side turbines that can only be operated or maintained as a complete unit. We can imagine a much higher engine mounting, with some of the bypass air flowing over the top of the wing. We can imagine moving the engines outward to give more clearance due to wing shape, at the cost of being less-capable of crosswind landings and being more difficult to fly straight when an engine is out. Or they could just do a clean new design.