I think some of the reluctance to accept what feel like ultra-conservative SAC comes from the fact that accidents, thankfully, are rare and becoming rarer over the long term. As an *individual*, the chances of all the holes lining up on a particular day are pretty low, so you can fly lots of very slick approaches (which could be categorised as unstable by some operators) and nothing bad will result. This falls into the classic "normalisation of deviance", although not with quite the risk levels of the space program.
The statistics say, however, that a very significant proportion of landing accidents occur off an unstable approach. To try and reduce the frequency of these accidents, we need to ensure that pilots don't fly unstable approaches AT ALL.
Because going off the side/end of the runway and/or taking the undercarriage off are rare events, not many of us have experienced them. They happen to *other* (stupid) people, don't they?
To put it into perspective, you could spend your whole career taking off grossly overweight but only suffer from it if you lost an engine in a certain timeframe on a limiting runway. No-one has suggested this is good practice, as it isn't, but it illustrates that just because you've done something many times without incident it doesn't imply that it's a great idea, especially when you are dealing with statistically rare but severe events...