I disagree, the Boeing leadership was pretty candid about the need to make an air gap between business leadership and engineering. From the excellent 2021 Seattle Times reporting:
It was the kind of big-picture planning Condit relished. General Electric famously had its headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut, separate from the diverse businesses it owned. As he and Hall talked, Condit became convinced that Boeing needed a similar structure. “Headquarters is supposed to be thinking longer-term: Where are markets going, have we positioned the company correctly, are we developing the right people, what’s the compensation structure that we have? The kind of things that are not how-do-you-design-an-airplane stuff,” as Condit later recalled. “How do you avoid getting deeply engaged in the day-to-day activity, and ignoring those strategic things?”
Satisfying customers that wanted... Hmmm what was it? Oh yeah, lower costs. SWA wanted a plane with the performance of an A320 neo without needing to train on an entirely new type. Boeing was able to make that plane, but it did not have the same flight profile as the old 737 - that was the entire reason for the MCAS device. It wasn't that the plane was unsafe to fly, it just HAD to handle the EXACT same as the old planes.
Because if it didn't handle the same, they'd have to retrain the pilots and that would cost more.
It's a cop out and playing "hide the weasel" to say that Boeing was simply trying to satisfy its customer. Nobody was holding a gun to their collective heads and forcing them to hide critical flight systems and actively block any mention of the system from the flight manual except for a single time in the glossary (Seattle Times on that reporting too). The only reason Boeing made the choice to conceal those changes and ultimately kill several hundred passengers was to protect the low cost for production for the 737MAX, and thus, low cost of procurement for their customers.