I'd choose to fly on a 737 Max over any other plane, personally. Because no other plane in operation has ever received the amount of scrutiny the Max has.
So no, I don't think every conceivable problem has been worked out because that's an impossibility. Unknown unknowns of aviation prevent that from ever occurring.
However, this plane in particular has had multiple independent regulators and thousands of independent pilots involved in the process to clear it. Additionally, pilots will receive new Max-specific training on the MCAS software so they'll be more aware of it and its operating modes from now on.
I would fly on a 737 Max and I'd have no problem taking family with me. You're more likely to be in a car accident by a substantial margin.
Back in the days, when we had much simpler systems, and the primary type of safety problem was component failure. Then yes, safety was about redundancies and failsafes. That is actually fairly easy: bring me a list of all components and I can come up with reasonable redundancy schemes for them.
Modern systems (including the operation of commercial airliners) are generally already built with reliable and redundant components. Safety problems tend to arise in the interaction between subsystems. That is a problem that can't be redundancied away.
That is also why it's close to impossible to work out every conceivable problem, as you say. The number of components is comparatively small compared to the number of ways in which subsystems interact. Especially considering some of those subsystems are in fact humans.
From this article(reality might be different) it seems to me that only MCAS related stuff was investigated and issues like the ones reported were dismissed that are not related so we should assume that other investigations were already done for those issues and nothing major was found.
My issue is that the FAA already rubber stamped this once. They've lost any credibility they have with regards to this plane.
As the other agencies I have no idea if they're susceptible to the same influence that caused the FAA to rubber stamp this the first time around.
Using a single sensor to control a plane is a mistake, which not even an undergraduate engineer would do. There is no way this was just accidentally badly designed.
They made this on purpose to change lives for $$
Furthermore, pilots were assumed to quickly identify and fix a "runaway horizontal stabiliser trim condition", providing the necessary backstop in case of system failure.
It's absurd to say that they made this on purpose to save some money. The aircraft already has two AoA sensors, but only one was used for MCAS. How is that saving money?
Rather, it was a convoluted concatenation of circumstances, pressure, occasional lapse in competence that gave rise to the problem.
It seems a totally legitimate viewpoint, even if it's one that many of us disagree with.
Downvoting just to signal disagreement is against the guidelines, isn't it?
Very reddit-like comment for someone saying HN isn't reddit though.