Is Boeing doing quick fixes for smallish orders and rebated Max'es

On Max 9 an extra emergency exit door is replaced with a blank if you don't want it instead of not cutting the hole for it in the first place. And it was mechanically fastened instead of welded in place. And since the inner panel is just a normal panel making it impossible to do frequent checks on the blank, of course it eventually fell out taking the inner panel with it. And in this case after only 147 flights. That is less than 1 year in use. 

On the other hand larger (in the hundreds) and original Max orders like the one from Ryanair get its own no mentioning of Max version number (737-8200) and  just uses a easily inspected normal door as it was originally designed for.

This hole covered by a blank must be a financial quick fix to avoid producing 2 different versions of the airframe (with or without a door hole) and not something engineers recommended. And with it came a number of uncertainties, lets call them risks, that for the economists was a case of numbercrunching the financials where lives and reputations clearly get a low value among todays Boeing top management. A mgmt that may not only have physically seen the solution and only cursorary have read about it in a note since they are east coast based and prefere trips to washington (possible location of new HQ), while production is on the west coast of a very large country.

Or the doorplug could be a leftover if one order went from am airline with a need of high density seating to one that wanted to offer more space for each passengers and therefore less max total passengers. So a result of Covid strains for airlines combined with Max crashes and a 2 year halt on Boeing delveries that led to some reorganisation of delivery of already produced planes. Result still a quick fix rather than a properly engineered solution.

This is just one new in a litany of problems for the ever increasingly sized Boeing 737. And no new plane type is coming forward in the 150-200 seat range from that manufacturer. Maybe they are hoping to buy a partially failed manufacturer since it obviouly is to expensive for them to plan and develope a new one from scratch. It can't be the timeframe since it only took 2 1/2 years to bring the 747 from plan to flying.

Possibly Boeing don't want to put billions into another plane before they see how the climate agenda moves forward and wether the future demands electric planes. Or planes based on a different fuel type altogether, yet not invented.