There is a long standing tradition in engineering to make improvements in successive generations of a design until there is a catastrophic failure. Usually the failure is a result of a focus on one element of the design and a failure to consider previously inconsequential factors.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge resulted from a focus on building a slender, graceful structure and a failure to consider harmonic and aerodynamic effects.

This seems to be a natural human tendency and is not limited to the modern world. There is a pyramid in Egypt where the pitch of the sides changes half way up. It seems that in the pre-Viagra age, Pharaohs suffered from "Pointy Envy" where the guy with the steepest pyramid won. During the construction of the subject pyramid, word came down the valley of a pyramid failure. It seems the sides blew out of an overly steep pyramid because the even though a pyramid is made from orderly stacked blocks, those blocks act like sand at pyramid scales. The builder decided that a bent pyramid was better than no pyramid at all.

The design elements of an airplane are like a fishing net. All the elements are connected to all the other elements. Pull on one and all the others are effected. Keep pulling and something, somewhere will break. The incremental increases in gross weight that seem to be the fashion are mileposts on a road that ends at a cliff. If you keep driving down the road, someone will die.

In any given year you have about a 1 in 75 chance taking the big sleep. If someone else did something that increased your risk of injury, let alone fatality, by one part in 10,000 you would scream like hell. Why would you deliberately erode the safety margins on an activity that is already "high risk".  And to what end, so you can drag along more junk that you probably don't need or use.

Airplanes just barely do what they do and it is a privilege to do what all prior sapients have only dreamt. Don't abuse that privilege. It is better to leave one friend on the ground then to have a foursome at God's Golf and Country Club. Unless that is your objective........

Fly Safe.

Regards
Brent Regan