The real salient point, which everyone is dancing around in the discussion, is "risk management" vs "risk avoidance".
We've noted many times that airmanship (or, in FAA parlance, Aeronautical Decision Making) is a journey that requires experience -- it cannot be learned in a classroom or summed up in platitudes. It is judgment, one of the main cornerstones of airmanship, where an aviator assesses risk, compares it to operational necessity, and determines which decision makes the most sense for that particular instance.
As we've also noted earlier, structures and procedures cannot supplant judgment or airmanship, but are often used by organizations to try and regulate decisionmaking by pilots operating inside those structures.
The reality is, in order to build judgment and airmanship, one has to be put in positions where they have to make a decision. The more diverse those experiences are, the sharper the "edge" on the decisionmaking and judgment will be.
Unfortunately, the artificial structures and procedures can be, and often are, so conservative that they keep a pilot from areas of flight that require real judgment to affect the correct outcome. This is where we get CFIs who are afraid to legally spin aircraft, IFR pilots with ridiculously high "personal mins", and dozens of other scenarios where pilots have extremely conservative decisionmaking because they are not exposed to the actual limitations of either their aircraft or their personal performance. Simply put, just like a muscle, judgment has to be exercised to remain sharp.
There's a reason that the phrase in airmanship is "risk management" and not "risk avoidance". Namely, that flying is an inherently risky undertaking, and that if we truly wanted to avoid risk, we would never even strap in and remove the control lock.
The airman's skill is in the ability to assess the situation and apply the appropriate level of risk acceptance for the conditions. The most conservative answer is NOT always the best answer. Defaulting to the most conservative answer is lazy airmanship, and does not always result in the most safe operation of the aircraft. In fact, risk avoidance, by definition, can be damaging to one's airmanship and decisionmaking, as it can artificially build limitations to a pilot's "bag of tricks" to solve the problems endemic to operating an aircraft. In other words, in such a scenario, a pilot and an aircraft may be safely capable of much more performance than the pilot thinks/believes.
The risk avoider is the mirror image of the reckless/aggressive/rogue pilot, who chooses to engage in risky behavior but has an overly aggressive list of what's acceptable. This is the "cowboy" -- for my military brothers who get the reference, this is "Bud Holland". The Bud Hollands of the world are the ones who are demonized because they are an easy lightning rod, but they simply occupy the polar opposite end of the same airmanship spectrum that a risk avoider does. The two are equally far away from the center, where the skill in making the high-performance decisions in dynamic situations live.
The bottom line here is that this "risk management" line moves: it depends on all of the factors involved in flight, including pilot, experience, aircraft, weather, location, conditions, maintenance, purpose of the flight, and the list goes on. The skill is in knowing what risk to accept on which occasion, and that it is, in fact, okay to accept risk when we decide to do anything at all in an aircraft.
