It's a few years since I worked in an EA but in my opinion Engineers no longer made airworthiness decisions but finance did. I say this because we (engineers) went to great lengths to investigate problems with the manufacturer and assess the risk that a problem presented. We could then (relatively scientifically) prioritise the airworthiness risk based on probability of failure and consequence. Logically, those managing this would then set a level of risk above which would not be tolerated and call it ALARP. However, the ALARP decision was purely based on the cost of rectification of each problem, thereby making ALARP purely a financial decision. Some lower risks were picked off because they were cheap fixes but sometimes more expensive higher level risks were considered ALARP because they were too expensive to do anything about.