How to fix Boeing's problem with the 737-Max8

I've passed this idea along to whitehouse.gov:

This concerns the situation with Boeing and the 737 – Max 8 aircraft. At present, all of those planes are grounded and may never fly again and, if that should actually come to pass, the situation could create major grief with the United States economy, possibly sinking Boeing.

Gigantic mismanagement is involved and the American taxpayer would not be happy about having to bail such a company out. The aircraft is substantially mis-designed. The idea was to save large sums of money on fuel by using engines which are simply too large for the aircraft. Part of those engines sit above the wings and the resulting aircraft is basically unstable. It has been made to fly via software and an MCAS device which can interfere with a pilots control of the aircraft. The plane in its present configuration represents an unacceptable level of danger to air travelers. It is highly unlikely that any kind of a quick fix can be achieved.

I believe that there is a workable solution to all of this:

If you are going to use those oversized and high-efficiency engines, the airplane you use them with has to be a high-wing design and not a low-wing design such as the 737. The Russian/Ukrainian manufacturer Antonov actually has such a plane (the AN 158) which is precisely what the 737 Max ought to be, with more than enough room under its wings for those high-efficiency engines. The idea would be as follows:

Have Boeing pull those high-efficiency engines off the 737 Max aircraft and refit those with more normal-sized engines; get rid of the MCAS and related software and sell those planes at cost to developing nations.

Have Boeing sign whatever licensing agreements might be necessary to produce the AN 158 in the United States with the high-efficiency engines which were meant for the 737 Max. The 158 is already certified, the cost of all this would be hugely less than designing and building a totally new aircraft and would take nowhere near as much time.

The AN 158 has numerous advantages over any competition which it might have aside from the high wings. It is capable of using short and crude airfields. Dirt and debris do not get sucked up into those engines. The 737, by way of contrast, even without the new high-efficiency and oversized engines, has been called the “vacuum cleaner” by pilots due to its habit of sucking every sort of twig or piece of dirt or debris on a runway up into those engines, often noisily. If Boeing were to do what I suggest here, they might could even fit turboprops or something substantially smaller to those existing 737 Max frames, and eliminate the “vacuum cleaner” problem in the bargain.