> What I didn't consider is that "being extra careful" can change in an instant. One little bump in balance, one little fleeting distraction, one little change of thought as you are mid-task and don't immediately stop to re-evaluate and you blow right on out of your after envelope.

This is a great summary.

Your best-laid plans (with power tools, motor vehicles, gravity, etc) can be completely invalidated with a single twitch (possibly not even your own). If you're operating at the margins of safety, there is no room for that.

And it takes experience to know where you are on the safety spectrum! But even that is sometimes inadequate.

For example, I love my radial arm saw. It's my favorite tool for cross-cutting wood. It's an old Craftsman, from the 1970s or so. I bought it from a furniture manufacturer who used it as an infrequently-used backup tool for ad hoc manual fixups, since new (they had big industrial machines for ordinary manufacturing operations). It was very close to new spec when I bought it, but I've tuned it back to perfect. All of the safety guards (the minimal ones that existed in the 1970s) except the dust hood were removed before I bought it.

Anyway, I love it. But they don't really sell RAS's at the consumer level any more, because people hurt themselves with them too frequently. Table saws are also quite dangerous, apparently. Circular saws are supposed to be the safest option, even more so than miter saws.

So I have a lot of experience with all of these tools, and with my RAS specifically. I think I know where I am on the safety spectrum, which I believe to be acceptably safe. But the statistics say otherwise, and one of us must be wrong. I don't think it's me, and my ten fingers attest to that belief.

Right? Or maybe wrong! I think about this every single time I use the RAS, which is probably a good thing. I guess we'll see.

I think a lot of the problem with power saws of all kinds is that each one looks nearly identical to the others, but they each are best for specific uses with only a small amount of overlap. Short cross cuts on a table saw are not as safe as using a radial arm saw or circular saw. Long rip cuts with a circular saw are not as safe (or convenient or repeatably precise) as a table saw. But a naive interpretation sees "blade goes around" and thinks "with a little effort, this one tool can do all of this." And, as a hobbiest or on-site worker, you may not have the room for all of those tools. So, you try to make do, and 99 times out of 100 it's fine, maybe not satisfying, but fine. You cut a little over, clean up the edge with other tools, generally just compensate for the shortcomings.

But 1% issues come up a lot when you're working a lot. I'm in the middle of the most complex project I've ever undertaken, a queen-sized bed frame. I'm about $1000 in on wood and $500 in on new tools. All told, ignoring my time (which is fair because this is also an entertainment activity for me), I'll end up saving at least $8500 over similar designs one could buy from a craft woodshop. And it won't fall apart in 5 years like a $1500 bed frame would.

My design doesn't have a lot of complex cuts, but it does have a lot of cuts total. And where I cut myself was in trying to "save money" and build a jig for something that was really only $100 for a new tool. To try to save about 1% of my "profit", I added immeasurable danger. Even with insurance, my urgent care visit was about $250 and recovery took long enough that it threw me out of the flow of getting the project done. I'm almost done now, nearly a year after starting, but only just restarted 3 weeks ago.

Every project is a series of decisions. I started off deciding I didn't want to buy a bed frame because the frames that fit my budget are junk. Once that decision was made, I should have trusted it and stopped trying to readjudicate cost, especially at such a small level.

I do a lot more with hand tools now. I'm not a production wood worker. If the project takes twice as long, it's not bread off my table. But errors in using hand tools are far less likely to end in literal catastrophy. And it really doesn't actually take twice as long. Maybe 25% longer. And it's an order of magnitude cheaper for the tools. And they fit in my basement shop better. Which is probably why you actually see quite a few "hand-tool only" production wood workers in the real world.