Good news to hear on a product that could continue to lead the long range twin market for 20 more years!
Specially now than Airbus is in doubt of rolling out the A350-800 and actually is not able to soddisfy all customer trimming the A350-1000 specifications.
The initial A350-800/-900/-1000 could end in a two model family with less commonality than initially promised to customers
The 777-8X/-9X could even be more better fitted to the market than the actual second generation 777 (-300ER/-200LR), where the "overperforming" -200LR seems to have failed to attract a lot of customer like the its older brother -200ER: there are just a couple of airline who took both the -300ER and the -200LR, while there are quite a few mixing the old -200ER with the newer -300ER.
I'm not sure of Boeing's move to reduce MTOW and engine size on the new model. Boeing of course claims that the new frame will permit the same payload range capability of the actual aircraft, instead of using this "buffer" to increse the payload/range performances (Emirates already declared its whish for a 777-300ER sized aircraft to fly the DXB-LAX route with a 50 ton payload, that is I assume about 20 ton over the actual performances of the -300ER).
Of course no one wants an overperforming/overpriced aircraft (we already see it with the -200LR), but we have never assisted to a model developement scaling down this way... any comments on this?