I think I articulated the problem pretty well. Incentives are structured such that there is no concept or serious consideration of what the ideal state is, just a bunch of stupid (though they may have been created with a grand plan in mind at one point) requirements that things must meet and it devolves into a box checking exercise that loses sight of the end goal and divides responsibility up so thinly that it basically evaporates. But the regulator, the trade group, the compliance certification orgs, etc, etc. get to trot out some number that shows good thing up and bad thing down and the racket goes on, and they have every financial incentive to do so.

The conditions in TFA don't show up overnight. People were blindly doing checklists for years with no shits given about the big picture. "Hurr durr the rules don't say condensation can't be running down the moldy-ass ceiling so it's fine" and all that. Eventually people got sick, then the regulator had to cover ass so they took a reasonable big picture look at the operation and the results were so bad a Congressional committee said WTF.

Regulating minutia consistently creates these stupid exercises where the forest is lost for the trees. But we won't stop regulating minutia because there are too many jobs and careers and whatnot tied up in it and it's easy to sell to the public.