It saddens me to see how creativity seems to "peak" at "let's go back to how we did it in 20th century" instead of asking the better questions like you did.

The flip side of this is "Chesterton's Fence"[1]. It's easy to propose "better" solutions, but grading has evolved to be what it is over the past 100+ years. Any novel solution will have different (and not necessarily better) second, third, or fourth order effects.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

it saddens me to see people testing parachutes on others instead of giving them functional existing parachute designs