You can throw 100's of thousands if not millions at a airframe you won't change the statistics at all, its all dependent on the person flying it.
Not sure I
entirely agree, although I do for the most part...if that makes sense...
Fundamentally the crew are always the most effective way to improve safety however I do believe that safety can be improved at the margin by improvement in technology. GPWS, glass cockpits, better autopilots and now innovations like synthetic vision make a single pilot operation less stressful from the flying point of view, giving one more time to think strategically and making mistakes less likely. This should translate into more safety...and on the whole for a competent pilot I believe it does.
The problem is that, like with the chute, the benefits are obscured by the wider issue of the general poor safety record in GA because of human factors/incompetence/stupidity call it what you will...
It doesn't make those hardware improvements redundant though, and doesn't mean that for a competent pilot the chute does not have a role to play in situations were the problem is insurmountable or the conventional landing option has a poor chance of success.