I hear ya..
Nothing beats properly selected Spruce and doped silk.
And bracing all around.
Two wings, just in case. None of this cantilever, crap. You look at it and you just know that it's gonna break. People tried it and it broke.
Sorry.. I'm feeling mean.
On a more serious note: with metal structures, we ended up finding methods to detect weakening of the material (fatigue cracks, and I don't know what else). Does anyone have a quick reference to what is state-of-the-art in this department for carbon composite structures? And I mean detection, not repair. The latter seems to be fairly simple, I've read.
People talk a lot about hidden delaminations as the worst thing to deal with. For this we have tapping tests.