Not much about the current regime running American Airlines involves Logic.
AA may not have gotten along with their employees in the past, but both sides grudgingly acknowledged that the other side was good at their jobs.
Now the management running the flight department of AA is frighteningly out of touch with reality, and quite possibly incompetent. The large number of fines from the FAA, repeated stand downs of the largest fleet etc, seam to bear that out. We have come a long way in the WRONG direction from the airline that set the record for the most consecutive operations (movements) without a fatality from May 1979 to December 1995. Somewhere recently the FARS became a GOAL instead of a Limit. And therein lies much of the problems.
The idea that slowly crossing a DEPARTURE runway might put passengers at risk is beyond belief. A couple of weeks ago Captain H. (Big muckety muck of flight) put out a "furlough mitigation proposal" that involved everyone left on the list flying MORE hours (Exactly the opposite of how you mitigate furloughs). The baldfaced lies to our face are just beyond belief.
Cheers
Wino