MDD still has significant blame. Almost all manufactured systems require maintenance steps to avoid failure. If some of those maintenance steps are very arduous and prone to error, then in some cases they won't get done, or won't get done correctly.

Design for maintenance is of supreme importance to me, as a software engineer(*), and none of the systems I build is going to kill even one person if they fail.

I flew on a lot of DC-10s back in the day. Indeed, I seem to remember flying to Australia from North America on one in the 1970s, though we had to stop for refueling in Nandi Airport, Fiji.

Glad I didn't know, but very soon I read, "It Doesn't Matter Where You Sit", and I did.

But (as you know) airline fatalities per million passenger miles in the 1970 were an order of magnitude greater than they are today, which means we have many times the passenger miles flown with just a fraction of the number of deaths, and it didn't bother us at the time.

The stories you write are enraging, but they are literally the exceptions that proved (meaning "tested") the rules.

Overall, the world aviation authorities have risen to the challenge in a remarkable way not obviously seen in any other contemporary industry.

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(* - Yes, this is often used as a synonym for computer programmer, but I do think of myself as an engineer, and the big difference to me is how much time I spend avoiding possibilities for error, even unlikely ones. Now I'm working for mechanical engineers who actually like software that takes a little longer to write but is extremely robust.)