On the other hand...
I have just a few hours in what I remember as a PA-31-325CR. Anyway, it was a short-body machine with contra-rotating engines and it flew just fine on two engines. My check-out was cursory, so that I never got to practice much engine-out work, if any. (This was back in 1981, so that memory has faded.)
We had a guy who used to get in our hair when we were operating strictly legal with Twotters to Hilton Head , South Carolina. We needed VMC to descend and land at the VFR-only airport, so that we'd divert to Savannah when we were down to MEA and still in the soup. Mr Navajo Chieftain would report that he was in the clear, just a few miles off our position and go on in to land. That was either 'superior pilot technique' or else 'flagrant cheating,' when I could not possibly say which.
So nemesis in the form of an engine failure after take-off saw him plop his Navajo down in the parking lot of a Snake and Ale restaurant, when the only survivor was the guy riding in the right front seat. He couldn't remember how he made it out but everyone else burned up with the aircraft, when most were probably killed or at least knocked unconscious on impact by the way the fuselage squashes down and then springs back into shape. I never read the final report, when there were the usual 'pilot error' rumors, but it might have been simply that the thing just didn't want to fly on one with a full, or too-full load, either slightly mismanaged or else even properly flown.
Then another guy I knew, liked and respected bought himself a Navajo to upgrade his little air taxi operation. He lost one engine right after rotation from a short strip and came around in a losing right-turn argument with VMC until he finally hit a big tree and died.
Then there was a former colleague who landed a job with a proper airline back in the world. He was on a positioning flight in a C404 when one engine failed. I don't know what went wrong but, again, they crashed and our man died.
In fact, I can remember quite a few of those crashes where, on paper, a light twin should have flown just fine but didn't. Overloaded, underperforming, poorly flown... who can say, but I don't think any of those crashes were suicide! The U.S. Army operated a version of the Beech Baron 55, the T-42 (?), when they had quite a few 'engine failure after takeoff' crashes, so that one of their safety specialists, a Major I believe it was, wrote some S.O.P.s about how to fly the thing properly. Well, their expert died in one of those crashes!
Those are now, for the most part, old airplanes with engines that have their best days behind them, and, anyway, Part 23 doesn't require guaranteed performance in any case.
I used to look at the performance charts for the Cessna 404 I was operating in Nigeria at ISA +15° and more, and then subtract for gear and flaps down to see how big a negative number that made, which was food for thought. To operate an old airplane at its WAT limits and expect to get away with an engine failure is being optimistic. That's okay; I have nothing against optimism, especially when you need a job, but you might find yourself forced to admit that things aren't working out and do a forced landing before your old Navajo, Baron, C402 or C404 makes that decision for you. Don't be too optimistic, in other words!