My very amateur understanding is that the MAX would have been dead on arrival if it required recertification. It was a marginal bump in fuel efficiency that sti

My very amateur understanding is that the MAX would have been dead on arrival if it required recertification. It was a marginal bump in fuel efficiency that still lagged behind Aerobus, so their only real marketing strategy was not having to recertify. Basically either it didn’t require recertification or it wasn’t worth making. I suspect somewhere along the line they realized that wasn’t practical and they either shipped a shoddy project and maybe burned a pile of money or they gave up and definitely burned a smaller but still sizable pile of money. Probably also some worry that if they didn’t have a competitive smaller plane, they’d lose market share and there’d be even less interest in their next plane.