I’d love to see someone trying to stay 100nm from CBs in an active part of the ITCZ. Much of the time you’d have to turn around and go back. Hell, 20nm is often exceedingly difficult.
I expend a lot of mental effort, along with the other pilot, trying to optimise routes through bad weather areas. A substantial deviation early doesn’t add nearly so much time and distance as a smaller one close in. Day VMC is much easier than night IMC: although I religiously avoid anything that looks threatening during the day, I’m sure I’ve sailed straight through stuff in the night which I’d have given a very wide berth to otherwise, simply because it doesn’t show up to the weather radar or eyeball.
We’ve also got “ice crystal icing” to think about as well as the normal stuff. Just when you’re congratulating yourself on a nice bit of weaving that kept you out of trouble, the windscreen lights up with St. Elmo’s.
As Uplinker says, aircraft are strong and it is almost unheard of for an aircraft to be lost because of structural failure due turbulence. It seems to be unsuccessful attempts to recover from a far-flung corner of the flight envelope that does for them these days...
