Another cynical take would be that SawStop has secretly invested heavily in a saw blade manufacturers to profit from more blades being destroyed when the stop event occurs.
Expect better than SawStop to appear when able, and this issue to go away.
Just putting out there: the popular idea that blades are always trash after an activation is not true.
That said, cheap big box store blades without carbide teeth will die a horrible death.
The missing teeth need to be replaced and the plate needs to be re-checked for runout, but most carbide-toothed blades are repairable.
Ruminating a bit:
Cheaper blades are replaced more often with use and can’t generally be sharpened; SawStop tech doesn’t change the lifetime of a blade unless an activation happens. So, if you’re already willing to run to the box store for another blade semi-regularly, whether one survives activation perhaps isn’t material?
On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t regularly use their saw is probably both more price conscious and less likely to need sharpening/replacement often. I assume they care most about whether an activation forces them to buy a new blade (and a $100 brake). I suspect those are the people who propagate “SawStop = trashed blade”. For them, it’s true.
However, the blade-preserving system puts the explosive between the table and the pivot that's already there for retracting the blade. The full explosion force is there to force the blade down and it ends up being faster than the SawStop. Which while cool the SawStop was already fast enough so it's all the same.
So I don't know, I guess to me I'm surprised that the solution we jumped to first was a brake when the action of moving it out of the way takes far far less energy. It's only the energy to move the weight of the blade and bar down at the requisite speed, instead of needing to absorb the full energy of the spinning blade.
Do you mean in a system with both moving it away and a break?
The only time my fingers hit the blade of a table saw they were moving with a fair amount of momentum and hit first low on the blade - dropping the blade at the speed of gravity wouldn't have been enough.
I haven't seen an explosive system like you mention - is that what Bosch had for a bit? - so I don't know just how fast that is, though dropping a spinning-towards-you blade also seems to have some other potential risks of grabbing shit with it, too. If it's fast enough I wouldn't be concerned as much, but at relatively slow speed it seems maybe nasty.