I won't dip to your normal conspiracy theories but...

This design for Volvo dates back the 14# and 16# cars but the 240 added a lot of modern creature comforts that made accessing the housing much more complex. As much as we all love the 240, a large part of the car dates back to design work from 1960's when:

6 fuses were enough for most cars
AC was not available from the factory on almost anything built in Europe that cost less than a house
Electric locks and windows were for luxury cars only
Automatic transmissions were the exception on European cars
NVH was treated as something to solve by turning up the one-speaker AM radio
Airbags...what are those?
Knee bolsters? Are those what Catholics kneel on?

By the time the 240 came along the designers were planning for all of these things without substantially changing the interior of the 140 for the 240. The exception was the center console. In 1991 all of the above were obsolete but the 240 was basically unchanged but did not have a change in interior layout (with the exception of the dash in 198?) since 1975...where did all that stuff fit?

The "crime" in my opinion is that the quality of the original blower motor was not to the level of the remaining mechanical systems in the car...but Volvo never installed a better one even when it had to be identified as a weak point by the early 1980's.