Look at it the other way - they didn't seek to sell the conditions, the companies looked to buy them. You give the example of no booking on before 05.00. How do you cover that work using night turns when the fragmentation of the industry means that the company probably won't have a depot at the other end of the route? I booked on at a silly time this morning to travel as a passenger to an extremity of our network. There are plenty of traincrew based there, but none of them are ours, and we've already established on these very forums that there's no business case for a depot there just to serve this one route. Booking on much earlier to dress it up as a night turn would then make it unreasonably long, much worse to work. Much of what has been 'sold' (or 'bought') relates to flexibility rather than fatigue-enhancing stuff. I don't think anyone's expecting that flexibility to be given up, but in a world of increasingly intensive diagrams, there's a lot that can be done to reduce the fatigue risk - things like limiting the turn length when booking on before a certain time, adjusting the placement of PNBs even where they're technically compliant, that sort of thing. It's not about pay or conditions, it's about a constructive process to benefit both sides of the table.
The same goes for most SPADs, I'm sure - the multitude of issues, that is. A pair of 158s probably would've stopped more quickly, maybe short of the signal. A dogbox trilogy just gives less opportunity to escape from an error. There is a bit of a trap waiting for you at the signal in question (it's very much overbraked from the YY - indeed, there's service braking distance from the YY to the Y) - hopefully something that'll be looked at, at some level as I know that there's a similar setup at quite a few other locations.
