Until the McDonnell Douglas management retires, Boeing will not recover. It's not a matter of an unlucky decade, it's a matter of replacing engineering with MBAing. It's just that the latency between cause and effect are long on the engineering side of this industry.
The merger was 27 years ago. While it may have been the cause at the time, there’s no more McD to blame. Anyone who was a senior leader in 1997 has long since retired. This is Boeing and only Boeing’s problem.
Those guys are top tier you have to admit— tank their company, get acquired, keep their jobs, eventually wrangle their way into managing their acquirer, tank the acquiring company… this is god tier MBAing.