Virgin Blue incident at Melbourne
 

Thoughts?

Virgin Blue wheel 'disintegrated' on landing

It's the old, old story.
Engineering costs money.
Lack of engineering costs lives.
Bean counters please take note.
The counters struck lucky, this time.

If a better system results in more focus at more appropriate intervals than blanket weekly checks, safety too can improve with cost reduction.

I think your response is somewhat flippant - management can certainly improve costs by doing things better. If this were not the case, little progress (eg moving assembly lines) would ever have resulted.

If you experience awful implementation, I grant you your opinion. Strong implementation is a different matter.

...seems more likely to be a maintenance issue rather than a design defect...

May not be a design defect, but it could well be a manufacturing issue couldnt it ??

It's happened to another aircraft in the UK too! So maybe more a manufacturing issue than maintenance.

Depends on what happened before (findings) vs what findings are present in the latest.

Did somebody find incorrect machining marks or material defects or just loose threads or missing washers?

If all one is comparing is two incidents, that's not much of a pointer for anybody not intimately involved to conclude from.