You're both saying the same thing from different worldviews. Regulations work to minimize risk, but in the process they can and often do also reduce effectiveness and/or progress in a field.
To take a less sensitive example, NASA refused to allow SpaceX to do retropulsive soft landings for their Dragon crew/cargo capsules without a whole slew of regulatory work, which was just not a very effective allocation of resources for SpaceX. So instead of coming down retropulsively, similar to how they now regularly land their massive first stages with, the capsules come down using parachutes and a not-so-soft 'soft' landing as we've been doing since the 60s.
So you could argue this is safer. But that's not clear. What is entirely clear is that the cost and time effort that would be required to abide the regulatory requirements resulted in the entire idea being scrapped, derailing technological progress on that front. Perhaps with some irony, the capsules will still have the thrusters on the capsules to be used in case of an emergency abort - they just can't use them to enable genuinely soft landings.
To take a less sensitive example, NASA refused to allow SpaceX to do retropulsive soft landings for their Dragon crew/cargo capsules without a whole slew of regulatory work, which was just not a very effective allocation of resources for SpaceX. So instead of coming down retropulsively, similar to how they now regularly land their massive first stages with, the capsules come down using parachutes and a not-so-soft 'soft' landing as we've been doing since the 60s.
So you could argue this is safer. But that's not clear. What is entirely clear is that the cost and time effort that would be required to abide the regulatory requirements resulted in the entire idea being scrapped, derailing technological progress on that front. Perhaps with some irony, the capsules will still have the thrusters on the capsules to be used in case of an emergency abort - they just can't use them to enable genuinely soft landings.