OK BOAC appologized for even mentioning statistics
But this blame game stuff about who knew what and when and lawyereese talk fails to understand the imperfect engineering world we live in and the implied risk we take when the unexpected happens.
In spite of all the intelligence that we bring to the design history
(statistics are hidden in there someplace) combinations of faults can come together to make a bad day. The regulations themselves can not force perfection but they can at least present a realistic approach that faults of any kind should be expected sometime, somewhere and as such we should address them as if they will happen if only at a surprised time. Isn't that why we put anti-locked brakes on a car?
Any designer and manufacturer of a jet engine knows full well that someday his engine will blow its guts out. He does his best to make sure it won't happen often and his regulator looks over his shoulder to make sure that he is doing his best.
But since history can repeat itself given enough time, the user of the product (the airplane manufacturer) does his best to mitigate the bad from the engine even though he has no idea of how or when it's going to happen (as we put air-bags in cars). Once again the regulator looks over the airplane guys shoulders to make sure that he is doing his best.
In spite of doing one's best, there are so many trades in risk going on here that even the mitigations of the consequences may not be relied 100% of the time
(there's that pesky statistics again).
So we're back to the hard facts that something failed and it must be addressed in some fashion that is less likely to fail again.
The mitigation of the failure was sucessful to meet the objective that no catastrophy ocurred. In spite of this, new experience both good and bad is there to be learned and applied in a fashion to benefit future safety.
The details in all this are now in the provence of the investigators and I await their disclosure.
Predicting the details ahead of time is just speculation and the more that we do it the more that we blind ourselves from truly learning from facts rather than beliefs.