Spencer, well yeah, we give more lattitude to those who operate in the Utility category because of the higher risk such tasks involve. At least he did not have passengers onboard.
The accident report did not say that he had anything hanging below the helicopter (e.i. on a hook) so I assumed it was a spray ship with booms? But he was over a partially-frozen lake. And 130 feet suggests that he was transiting from one place to another, not dispensing the product. Unless that's the altitude they use...which seems kind of high to me...
The thing about Utility flying is, I think, that it breeds complacency. We understand that the actual on-the-job flying may involve corners of the flight envelope in which one would ordinarily not wish to be. But I've seen plenty of Utility pilots who continue to fly that way even when they weren't actually performing their task. They just got used to flying that way and just did it all the time, I suppose. But it's still a helicopter, still subject to the applicable laws of physics and science as we all learned in flight school.
There are a couple of lessons from this accident, I would say.