I would have more interest in sorting out the manual trim issues by at a minimum providing a training program to remove the cobwebs of time past than to worry over a fan blade issue, where the risk of a disk failure is vastly more problematic and almost impossible to mitigate, it is to be avoided.
I think the most concerning part of the FAA internal dispute over the threat to the rudder cables from uncontained failure is that the engineers involved believed that management was improperly weighing cost and efficiency (as seen by B) versus safety. Remember that the Times investigators reviewed an FAA document that conceded that the design doesn't meet the guidelines for protecting flight controls and that the FAA's own panel investigating the engineer's formal complaint found that the managers who took B's side in the disagreement created “an environment of mistrust that hampers the ability of the agency to work effectively.”
The environment depicted by the Times story (along with a fair amount of similar material we've been seeing) seems fundamentally damaging and dangerous in and of itself, aside from questions about quantifying the risk to the rudder cables.