Don't expect a rational response anytime soon if those making decisions are politicians or people (ie. bureaucrats) controlled by politicians.
For a direct comparison, consider the risk of death or serious injury due to Carbon Monoxide poisoning. There are a number of deaths in UK every year caused by a 'combustion process' of some kind that's gone wrong (insufficient ventilation, broken flue, ..). The majority of the 10 to 20 annual deaths are caused by solid fuel burners or combustion of other than piped gas. However, a great deal on money is spent on CO awareness', fitting CO alarms which in the case of room-sealed, well-maintained appliances are almost entirely redundant, etc., a lot of it on piped-gas systems. The result is that maybe £15m is spent 'per death' on issues directly related to CO (omitting cost of training and certification of gas fitters) although it's perfectly obvious that a major part of this spend will make absolutely no difference to the annual death rate.
Politicians see votes in supporting CO Awareness, etc. but no votes in not supporting it, so that's where the money goes!
Similarly for everything involving safety issues: no benefit in reducing 'safety' and associated costs. Every political benefit from increasing it, even if from the outset it will make no difference to the safety outcome! (You will often see politicos doing their public grief acts, with a soundtrack along the lines of 'We tried and tried, and look, we increased safety budget by 50 % only last year. But sadly, despite all our efforts, Mrs Snoggins and her eleven chidlren all died in this freak accident'. It wasn't a 'freak accident', it was just 'an accident', and chances are the same result would have occurred if the budget had gone up 100%! People are dumb and screw up!
Aircraft, ATC and airlines' management of risk are highly developed and deliver excellent safety overall. However, you cannot entirely eliminate human failure and unquantifiable / unforeseeable risks such as SLD and VA. That's no excuse for pretending that zero VA is the only option, or is actually a viable option. We just need better forecasting.