I wonder if Boeing is simply too big and technically complex for any human to manage it effectively.
Boeing didn’t used to be too big to manage and it actually did more. They just lost sight of the reason they exist and expend all their energy on things that don’t make them successful. A lot of times executives fashion incentives around what is good for themselves rather than the company.
Plenty of other defense contractors succeed in big projects even with a generous amount of strategic incompetence.
If the intention was for the bridge aircraft to have all the capabilities of the older aircraft it would have. I have to wonder if the main point of the exercise was highlighting Boeing’s incompetence.