Unfortunately, at least in my experience, the level of 'air safety' or indeed airworthiness, an organisation achieves is not at all related to the amount of regulations it tries to obey. I once chaired a meeting where we aimed to take a 'first pass' at comparing RN and RAF aircraft operating and maintenance regulations. The RN guys came in with four or five books. I am not making the next bit up. The doors swung open, and our RAF colleagues pushed in a large four wheeled trolley loaded up with many tens of volumes. Note - these were the non aircraft specific regulations.
I for one am a great believer in keep it simple, I always have believed that burdensome legislation is not and never has been the way to go forward, It hampers those trying to achieve airworthiness whilst no matter how much paperwork you produce, those that failed to carry out such work previously are never going to do so simply because you have produced more rules.
In an ironic twist, EASA in their quest to make light maintenance "simpler" (read.. push responsibility off their shoulders and onto others) have pushed it on individuals to produce their own maintenance programmes for their aircraft, this has resulted in each individual aircraft of each individual type having a different maintenance programme, where as before you operated to a generic one size fits all that covered the basics, thus ensuring safety and a minimum standard. Now it is in my eyes cost driven.