I have never thought that safety was hard. After all, I never met a pilot who thought that they wanted to kill themselves or an engineer that knowingly pushed an aircraft to the line knowing that it had a catastrophic fault. I have known operators who would push their pilots to perform acts that were dangerous and I have known pilots who managed to kill themselves by being utter tools. However, generally most pilots wanted to arrive at their destination alive and by so doing so would their passengers.
I no longer fly, gave it up several years ago and have not missed the experience one iota. That is thanks to CASA but that is irrelevant as are they. What I did notice was that as pilots would gain experience they would begin to cut corners. Not literally but in safety margins. I human factors it is referred to as the "normalisation of deviance". The operational safety margins would get shaved and that new margin would become the new standard. Then that standard gets cut and so on and so forth until one day it ends in tears. My last few years before retirement were spent as safety manager for the last company I had flown for. That erosion of safety standards was my single biggest prevention issue.
In private operations we have an ageing GA population (several years ago in the USA the average age in GA was 59 I think) and with increasing expense of flying maintaining standards gets more expensive and easier to put off. I flew for 6 months in outback SA and was appalled at the safety levels I saw among some of the private flights coming through. In many cases a total lack of preparedness for outback flying. "I have a GPS - don't need maps" approach was common. What I read of many crashes makes me think that a degree of caution was not applied to the flight. Whether this was due to ignorance or allowing a deterioration in standards I don't know (leaving aside the Mangalore mid-air - that may far more complex) but ultimately safety is in the pilots hands and decision making.
p.s. The Ansett demise started way before the change of ownership. It has its roots back in the 2 airline policy days.