Thanks John for the clarifications and summary. I absolutely agree with your point about risk management, although I'd emphasis (as you've alluded to) that minimum regulatory requirements should not form the sole basis for operational risk management - particularly the more prescriptive style rules of which you still seem to have a few in Australia (although, pleasingly, CASA is slowly learning about performance-based oversight/regulation from their good friends across the ditch
). There will likely be some other rule requirement that a multi-engine aircraft on revenue passenger operations must 'clear all obstacles in the takeoff flightpath' after suffering a failure of the most critical engine at the most critical point, and that's probably the catch for this particular issue I'd think.