Laws exist, but they can and are policed and applied in all sorts of different ways.
Indeed.
And among those ways are "inconsistently" and "arbitrarily" and "unpredictably", and the more laws there are the greater the scope for the foregoing. (You realise of course that no "regulatory philosophy" can stop or dictate the way in which FOIs and AWIs and investigators exercise their powers, even if it's the DAS's thought bubble?)
You should read the Report of the Aviation Safety Regulatory Review, and mark the significance of Mr Skidmore's comments about it in front of the Senate Committee as well as his recent statements about Part 61. He's just going to keep on keeping on running the system that's adding rules to the regulatory dog's breakfast.
I suppose your point is that it doesn't matter if there are another couple of thousand pages of regulations in a few years, provided the regulator has a "philosophy" of policing and applying them ... what word encapsulates the concept ... hmmm ... "nicely"?