Re engine failures. As I pointed out in the PFL thread if you are flying behind your typical Lycoming or Continental engine and it stops there is about an 80 % chance that the failure was caused by you, the pilot.
Again the point is if you have to use your skygodly flying skills to pull off that forced landing, because you let the engine fail by running out of gas or not draining the tanks of water, or mis selecting the fuel etc etc ; I don't think you are any better than the guy who did the same thing and pulled the chute.
The only difference is the accident record shows you are less likely to kill your self in the forced landing of your Cirrus than if you pulled the handle.
The solution for the unacceptably high accident rate for high performance SEP's is simple, do the training !