I know exactly why people consent to fly aircraft that are held together with duct tape. The people who taught them to fly implicitly or explicitly sanctioned it.
The first time a student pilot preflights an aircraft with a missing screw, a bent antenna, or a scratch on the paint, the student either reports it to the instructor, or assumes his all-knowing instructor is familiar with it. The instructor doesn't reject the aircraft, and they fly it. The student learns that that defect is okay.
Say the student reports after preflight inspection that the tail tie down ring is bent. Such damage could indicate a significant impact, and possible airframe damage. But what do you say? "Yeah, it's okay. It's been that way for a long time."
It's a hell of a lot of bother for an instructor to go through tech logs with a student, finding the date of the initial damage, the subsequent inspection and the maintenance sign off. If you couldn't find it, would you demand to know?