I guess designing and engineering anything is a compromise and a balance between conflicting things, but it sounds like the Max was too much of a compromise with bad results and nasty surprises.
Aircraft design & manufacturing can take decades when you start from a clean sheet of paper. But done right, you get a successful product that flies well. Still, a successful aircraft design can fail in meeting the airlines projected needs 10 years out.
So the temptation arises to take a successful design (the 737) and “stretch it” to have it fill a niche that it wasn’t originally designed for. The Risk: you take a well-balanced plane that flew well in it’s original design and you unbalance it such that it requires some fancy software to manage the control inputs. Not good.