Ethereum is a general purpose system: it has sharp edges. We can use the same reasoning to condemn C/++'s pointers (people trip over themselves all the time, even serious audits occasionally miss big bugs), but we still survive with C code running much of our lives. If there's issues with implementing in ethereum code directly, there are many ways of addressing it and only some of them view the issue here as a 'flaw' rather than a 'hard to use feature'.

Ethereum just has to work. It doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be easy. Being pretty will help it work, but there's enough money on the table, and TheDAO demonstrates this, that it will advance on alternative institutions if it works.

TheDAO may never be 'safe' or 'perfect'. It only has to be safe right now, from the threats that real, interested parties are capable of implementing. This list of threats is quite large at 250,000,000$, and will be larger when/if TheDAO/its descendants hit 250,000,000,000$+.