what about at night or with low overcast?
Then you buy a 421C, or some other twin, if you want the extra capability and the extra peace of mind, and you pay the extra running cost.
Or something with a PT6 up front.
There is a continuous spectrum of mission capability and operating cost.
But there are - for most GA flyers - almost no airports that you can land at after flying in the dark.
The overcast issue one can address to a degree by running an appropriate type of topo GPS moving map, non-IFR.
Have you looked through the list of chute pulls? I have. In some cases I think there was awful decision making that got the pilot into the situation but I can only think of two that I would seriously second guess.
Thinking of the reports I have read, I think the "awful decision making" is what I had in mind, preflight perhaps.
OTOH I speak as a cautious IFR flyer, who is quite picky about icing conditions and crappy/convective weather generally. There are many IFR flyers who more or less always go and I am sure they would have a different view. My view is that a non-deiced non-radar-equipped plane needs to be used fairly cautiously, especially if it is "plastic" in which case you are relying totally on bonding.
For instance, it is difficult to imagine that all cirrus pilots are trained poorly (as opposed to all non-Cirrus pilots)
I don't think that is the case; in fact Cirrus pilots should, by now, be trained better than average, due to insurance industry pressure (in the USA, at least).
But Cirrus
have done two things which are fairly new in this very stale industry: (1) they have dug up a new stratum of flyers, often younger men (rather than the cantankerous old codgers who make up the bulk of the GA community
which traditional GA products have been aimed at) and (2) they have advertised with ads which tended to emphasise the simplicity of flying their machines, and their use for casual personal and business travel.
(1) has been a great service to GA which has seen a continuous decline since the 1960s. It may draw out some new truly daft pilots but I am not sure that's the case because so many "old" pilots have got away with bad habits for years, by luck.
(2) I do have an issue with; I think it is misleading. Cirrus are not the only one; look at the recent Cessna 400 ads with that stupid businessman saying he can now do 3 meetings a day. Anybody who knows how aircraft performance and equipment maps onto weather capability, assuming a non-cowboy, will know it's a con.