No, the whole mess was created by the old McDonald managers in the old merger. Muilenburg inherited the MAX from McNerney, but you can easily blame his predecessor Stonecipher for all that Boeing mess, when they moved to Chicago and outsourced everything.
Again, you can push the blame back and back and back in time, but putting an engineer at the helm doesn't seem to have righted the ship either. Then it's not clear why such a background is necessary or sufficient for the successor in that position. Arguably the more important criteria may be that a candidate be from outside the Boeing organization, thus making them better suited to see beyond the existing structure and culture.
Once a company like Boeing is put on the slippery slope, it keeps going down south, until you make radical changes. Notice that in most of these engineering driving businesses, the culture was built bottom up, right from the birth of the company. You are now trying to restore that top down. Its not really possible.
People don't realise how hard it can be rebuild the organisation once sufficient corruption has set in. If you do away with top talent, processes and promote regular career managers to run things for you, they will do everything in their power to ensure no right people will ever rise to a position of power. This is for a simple reason that they feel a threat to their jobs.
At that point in time, there is no way a company can resurrected bottom up. Your only options are getting some great talent and then tearing apart the whole company and rebuilding it over time. This is not even possible after a while.
