Put me down for it landing safely.
Manned space flight is risky. There’s no way around that. You have to set your risk threshold and know that you’re never 100% certain of a safe flight.
My guess is that Boeing can’t be sure enough that the astronauts will be safe. Just taking a wild guess, they might want something like 95% odds of a safe flight. But all of their software tweaking and analysis might be leaving them with 80% odds. So no manned return.
But the odds would still favor a safe return, just not safe enough to risk lives on it.
That, or the big wigs decided that the current black eye won’t get all that much worse by letting their astronauts fly home on SpaceX. But killing them would be a disaster to their stock bonuses.
—Peter