Really? My conclusion from this saga has basically been that the 737 Max is fine when flown by first-rate carriers (American, Southwest) and conversely that no plane is safe to fly with 3rd or 4th rate carriers in the third world (Lion Air).
Everything comes down to the Swiss Cheese - you're focusing on Boeing's hole, while I care more about the stack of holes that Lion Air maintained.
At the same time, Ethiopian flew a copilot with (IIRC) 200 hours of total flight experience. This changes emergency CRM from "one person flies the airplane, the other diagnoses the problem" to "Captain flies the airplane, babysits the newbie, and attempts to diagnose the problem".
As for Ethiopian Airline's 'stellar safety record', comparing these two wikipedia pages [0] [1] they seem to have a similar (recent) safety record to Aeroflot. Yeah, Aeroflot's gotten better, but not that much better. (Ethiopian has two incidents that resulted in fatalities 2000-2018, discounting passenger hijackings - Aeroflot has one. Both have one "everyone on board" incident. And while I'm not sure about relative flight frequencies, Aeroflot has a fleet of 253 planes to Ethiopian's 112. For comparison, Delta has had 0 incidents resulting in fatalities since 2000 [2] on a fleet of 896. Same goes for United's fleet of 778 if you exclude hijackings - American (with a fleet of 962) had one non-hijacking incident in 2001) So I'm honestly not sure what people are talking about there.
