I was pretty disappointed in this article; I was expecting a deep dive into the merger and its effects, but I all I got was the surface-level stuff that everyone repeats over and over, without any verification that any of it is really the reason.

As other sibling posters have mentioned, it feels like there was a lot more to it. Sure, the McDonnell Douglas executives taking over Boeing after the merger certainly didn't help, but the regulatory, competitive, and economic environment had changed drastically by that time. I do wonder if the causality is a little reversed: the McD-D CEO taking the reigns at Boeing may have been more the effect of these shifts, a reaction to the relatively new shareholder pressure to control costs.