There have been multiple paintings made, but if it doesn't have a 900 square foot wing, then it's not an XX.  In my humble opinion, despite the abuses of marketers and VP's.

MacD corporate culture took over Boeing, and ate the company from the inside out.  

You know there’s only one actual reason, right?

The congressional districts and the congressmen that MacBoeing has PAID for, need some more money and contracts.

That’s it.  Let’s not pretend there are other reasons.  

Almost exactly backwards.

Boeing was losing money on every airliner because the cost to build was unknown.  Zillions of square feet of office and shop space scattered over Puget Sound down to Portland.  Warehouses full of stuff in storage that none of those MBA's were doing the BA part to reconcile (that was a problem until very recent years).  A typical shop union that wasn't disciplined (and won't be).

Boeing culture included laying off an entire project instead of filling the empty jobs at the other site in town, then attempting to rehire a few weeks later.  Over and over.  At the end of 777-300 a bunch of pissed off strength and design engineers left for good.

MDA was in a slump and was looking for an acquisition, probably an electronics company.  Then the buyout by Boeing was arranged, and the new Boeing was headed by a group consisting of existing chiefs from Boeing and MDA.

From a view 30 years later, I recognize how the reorganization if engineering started the decline in St. Louis, first with a pure implementation of "integrated" product teams along with the corrupted versions of TQM and every associated idea.  At the same time technical training and uniformity declined as skill departments disappeared and we're combined with unrelated skills.  Liaison engineering started reporting to manufacturing, a clear conflict of interest by manufacturing.

Now engineering organization is a train wreck in St. Louis.  There are no departments and there is no leadership.  The notion that any manager can manage anything is getting new legs, the reason is that it's possible by following the thousands of rules forming the bureaucracy.  All that matters are those rules.  Rules that fit everything, rules that fit nothing, and missing the rules about applying some degree of sense.

New hires are thrown into work and are lucky if they are assigned a lead engineer that will lead, guide, and teach them the trade.  Most aren't.

The genesis started at John Cappeluto and his useless right hand Herb Lanese and weak leadership from the McDonnell family, John and Sandy, mostly.  After Stonecipher took over, the changes at the worker level were at least not much more damaging.

After the buyout, spread of the internal culture of Boeing started to spread.  There was effective resistance at first, but it's like rust and slowly spread.  The culture that designed the F-15 and miracled the F-17 is almost gone, and it's not coming back.  The Boeing way has smothered McDonnell Aircraft and the (sometimes scary, sometimes careless, sometimes unethical) ideas that build tubes with wings flying benign envelopes do not work on high performance fighter aircraft.

In the end, the combination created a toxic waste dump.