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Notes -
I admit to writing very loosely last night (rushing and not editing as I boarded a plane), but despite wincing at my "never" hyperbole I still could nearly bite this bullet:
Append "above a determined rate" and you get the typical FAA/NASA solution: achieve "no" failure by conservatively predicting failure risk and then not flying until your design has pushed that risk under that rate. This doesn't work well (see: Shuttle), and if overapplied this philosophy would be the death of SpaceX R&D ("If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." - Musk), which is vastly more time- and cost-efficient and more successful than that of it's more hardware-efficient competitors, but selectively applying this philosophy to the cases where it's someone else taking the risks' downsides may not be crazy.
A more outside-the-box alternative would be having better failsafes than "activate hypersonic shotgun mode" for failure. This particular failure wasn't a "now you see the spacecraft, now you don't" thing like Challenger, it was a video-visible bay fire, followed much later by a grossly telemetry-visible propellant leak, slowly followed by gradual failures of one engine after another, all on a stage for which the ability to reenter in one piece and target a landing spot without propellant use is it's whole raison d'etre. Even without trying to make use of that, in this case simply cutting off propellant to delay the explosion could have pushed the debris field further east over empty ocean.
Maybe those are crazy solutions. But we live in a world run by voters full of crazy demands. The attitude of "what do you wanna do, basically quit spaceflight?", in a world where we haven't been back to the moon for half a century, shouldn't be considered as a final argument without always remembering that one man’s modus tollens is another man’s modus ponens. I'm a huge fan of spaceflight, and I'm a huge fan of SpaceX in part because so far they're the only ones in history to take spaceflight at scale seriously. But they've done so at the discretion of regulators who insist that they can be stopped in their tracks if they don't e.g. first get good psych test results from kidnapping a seal and playing it Spotify's Greatest Sonic Boom Hits. This is not a world in which "don't let chunks of your test flight fall on people" is an obviously evadable requirement.
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