I'm saying I don't buy that the FAA was ever likely to catch the problems with this system that the engineers at Boeing didn't catch. In hindsight it's easy to

I'm saying I don't buy that the FAA was ever likely to catch the problems with this system that the engineers at Boeing didn't catch. In hindsight it's easy to say the system was a problem and clearly it was, but the FAA was never going to catch anything. The meeting with the FAA pilot you mention only goes to reinforce this; nobody in the FAA is ever going to have all the right context to put this together. Rather than trying to find some meeting with the FAA where someone could have caught it, there were probably many many meetings inside Boeing where it should have been caught.