I'm having trouble blaming DFO being where it is because there have been buildings in that area for the better part of 60 years. And if it missed the DFO its next stop was probably a concrete wall or the bank on the Tulla as a best result. Worse would have been the freeway itself at peak hour.
1960 ladies and gents. You can see the area where DFO is has buildings already
1967 - 68. Tulla under construction.
A Decade of Aerial Photos | Essendon Airport
A clearer photo of what was there in some of the photos in that gallery.
DFO is just a development of an area that already had buildings.
And if you go off 35 and have a failure that sends you right at about the same angle, welcome to fuel tanks. That's not going to be any better result.
Unfortunately whatever went wrong was probably not going to end well. Whether DFO was there or not.
And at other airports in Aus there is every chance of that sort of accident hitting a terminal building or some other aviation related building. This one hit a DFO that was put in a spot that was previously developed.
Its lovely that you want airports to exist in vast open expanses, but that clearly isn't really possible.