As much as I sympathise with people who's baggage goes off on an adventure without them, I just treat it as something that comes with the territory of travel.
Family member has just arrived in Berlin to find that non of the checked bags made it on board. But amazingly it seemed to take two hours from arrival to find this out.
Yes, things can and will go wrong with the odd bag, especially where it involves multiple transfers, but the point the O/P raised is the attitude of the airline when all the baggage on the flight doesn't go.
Yes, mistakes happen but it's how you handle them that shows the quality of the organisation.