Thread drift, but I'll bite; there's a fundamental flaw in the certification system. The FAA and EASA certification is based on known entities and if you bring something new to the market that hasn't been proven, however trivial, they will bury you under certification requests. This favors not only big players with big pockets who have less inclination to renew as they have vested interest likely already in the marketplace. And as I mentioned earlier, once you've gone through the rigmarole of having a certain, say, engine in the type cert for an aircraft, they have you by the b***s.
Ultimately, this will in the end create unsafe scenarios, or let me put it this way; sticking with older, more unsafe solutions rather than replacing them with newer, safer options, simply because it's cost and legislatively prohibitive to do so.
Let me give you a real world example. My AC520 has old, 50's seats with really low back rests. No support for the head and a real whiplash feast should you ever bump into anything. All you've got is a two point lap belt. I wanted to change the seats (not the support or attachment, just the seat) for one of those new, snug, racing carbon fibre seats and add a 5 point harness. Can't be done legally. You are not allowed to change or even alter the seats without an STC. You're not even allowed to add a 5-point harness to the existing one without a STC or at the very least a 337 FSDO approval.
How does this benefit safety?
There are thousand examples like this where clearly the safety is of no concern, but bureaucracy is.