The motives were there regardless of how Boeing chose to act. It's the chosen act that is potentially criminal. The DOJ is not in any doubt as to whether or not Boeing had a motive, and it is not considering at all the question of whether regulators have now allowed Boeing and the airlines to treat the 737 MAX family as much more closely related to earlier 737’s than they actually are, regardless of any parties' motives in that regard.
It is not at all clear what (if anything) A and B are standing in for here, so instead of discussing them, let's go back and see what specific issue prompted our disagreement over whether it was to the point here. It was just this: "There’s a bigger difference between the MAX family and other versions of the 737 than there is between all the different crossovers a car company pumps out..." [1] (specific weight differences elided for brevity.)
I won't dispute the implicit claim that this was an important factor in Boeing running into development difficulties, but running into development difficulties is not a crime. Materially misrepresenting the state of the development process (specifically (IMHO) the magnitude of the high-AofA handling problem, rather than merely weight issues) to the FAA is a crime, and it is this, not the fact that Boeing ran into technical difficulties, that is the point of DOJ's investigation, the article, and the discussion here of it.
It wasn’t developed difficulties at issue here. They inserted a system and hid what it did and where it could fail from pilots and airlines. Quite literally removing it from the manual: “elected to not describe it in the flight manual or in training materials” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
So when it failed and pilots had no idea what the issue was people died. The crazy thing here is telling pilots about it could have prevented those crashes even with an absolutely identical aircraft being released.
Perhaps the first thing to note about your latest response is that it makes no mention of the increase of weight of the MAXes over their predecessors, and yet it was specifically over the relevance of the weight change where we disagreed [1]. I have followed this story quite closely, and I haven't seen anyone citing the weight gain as being a factor in this tragedy, let alone claiming that the weight gain itself amounted to something criminal (or that Boeing was somehow hiding it, for that matter), and your summary here, by its omission of the weight issue, tacitly acknowledges its lack of relevance.
The second omission from this summary is any mention of Boeing's interaction with the FAA staff having the responsibility for certifying the MAXes as airworthy (together with the adequacy of the flight manuals and training materials), and yet, in all other accounts I have seen, Boeing misrepresented (to put it mildly) the extent to which MCAS was modifying the handling characteristics of the airplane and therefore the consequences of its failure and the need for pilots to know about it. No-one else, as far as I am aware, disputes the fact that the DOJ's investigation is centered on this dissembling (together with similar dissembling relating to the plug door incident, which is being included on account of the MAX issue being in a deferred prosecution status.) Once your account here is augmented with this missing information, it becomes clear that this pattern of dissembling is what the DOJ is investigating as a possible crime, as I have been saying all along.
Now you want to extend this disagreement by disputing my characterization of Boeing's difficulties in developing the MAXes as being, well, development difficulties! It is not clear to me what point you are trying to make by doing so, but to be clear, I am most certainly not dismissing the tragedy as merely a matter of development difficulties. On the contrary, I am saying that this became a criminal matter precisely when Boeing went beyond treating the matter as an above-the-board technical problem, and started misleading the FAA.
Regulators aren’t at issue, but trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny is. Or as is often said it’s the coverup that they get you for.