I suppose it's worth remembering that in the early days of preservation you could obtain a Light Railway Order, which allowed you to skimp on a lot of things, and recreate your own ramshackle Colonel Stephens-type set-up which no-one in the HMRI would really bother worrying about too much. It's clearly this sort of thing that the OP is hankering after, using the old "well, it never did me any harm" defence.
Nowadays, of course, you can't do that, and you have to be able to prove you have processes and systems that are safe. This change should have come about far earlier, in my opinion. A lot of people are clearly bitter and angry about it, but like many people, I'm not convinced there were ever "good old days", there were just "old days". There were things we did then because we thought they were OK, and there's things we don't do now, because we've realised they're not.