Point taken re reading your earlier posts and I agree that the media seems to over-react to many incidents recently however, I think Steve has made the statements he made for a very good reason.
Over my years in the industry, I have seen the focus shifted from safety and compliance above cost to a situation now where we have bean counters playing a very dangerous balancing act. LAME-less push-backs are a good example.
Nobody knows (yet) the extent of the problems that caused the wheel to come off the aircraft in question however, a few things should be considered.
1) During push back, there may quite likely have been signs that something was wrong. A strange sound perhaps? May not have been evident until the aircraft was actually moving.
No LAME there to observe this.
2) What would have happened had the plane taken off without incident, flown, landed and the wheel come off upon landing? I'd suspect we would have been looking at an incident a bit more serious that what actually occurred.
The point is, how far can cutting back on engineering safely go? Is it really worth the risk to keep going down this path?
Safety before schedule is the catch cry nowadays. If only those that promote this were genuinely serious about it instead of just pissing in our pockets.