> Nothing I've ever seen or experienced with FAA indicates a lack of care

Hard to fathom someone still holding that view after the 737MAX disasters.

The NTSB has repeatedly and publicly criticized the FAA for failing to implement their recommendations, including as recently as last week (Amazon Prime crash resulting in 5 deaths). They've explicitly called out the FAA's failure to act as a contributing factor in crashes, multiple times.

Regulatory capture ruined the FAA.

The problem is with considering the second path a backup path. It is a common problem with things that are considered to be a backup. In contrast, both paths should ideally have been in regular use. As a general policy, for resiliency, one should always exercise all of one's routes/suppliers/vendors, even if some are suboptimal, not just the primary one.

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