Aviation doesn't work that way. If a moving plane screws up in any way (too close to another plane, wrong taxiway, botched takeoff/landing, etc) it will be noticed. The US also has the widely used ASRS system for confidentially reporting safety issues/lapses of any kind for everybody's benefit, and most other countries have similar systems now, although I can't vouch for Ethiopia specifically.
I'm not sure we understood each other. I understand aviation is heavily monitored by the field, but maybe only a few (when fatal or grave) sample of incidents gets to the public eye.
Unless walkingolof is also in the field and by 'track record' he meant even 'up to the slightest faults'.
All aviation accidents are reportable in most civilised countries, and the reports will be public. For an airliner (which these are) they'll invariably make the news. For little prop planes in GA nobody cares unless someone died.
Take an example from Ireland, an island near me. A crew screwed up and typed the wrong temperature into the computer, which calculated take-off thrust based on higher density air than was reality. As a result they had inadequate acceleration and smashed a runway light with their wheels because they took off far too late. Nobody died, nobody even needed a band aid, but that's a reportable accident and made minor headlines... even though it happened in another country miles away.
As your parent indicated, the US further has ASRS, so that not only accidents, but incidents short of an accident (situations in which something went wrong, but fortunately it did not cause an actual accident), are reported. These are anonymised to protect the reporter but you can see (anonymous) reports by aircraft type in a public system.
On the model of plane they were flying that isn't possible. There was a firmware upgrade which compares the input temperature to the temperature detected by a probe on the engine feed and if they're too different rejects the input temperature (which subsequently means the plane acts as though you didn't input a temperature at all, disabling auto-throttle) but their airline had not yet applied this optional firmware upgrade.
The larger answer to your question is Raymond Chen's standard explanation on the The Old New Thing. By default no features are implemented so by default that's why your preferred feature isn't implemented.
The accident investigation was more interested in the other thing, given that for whatever reason the plane's acceleration is inadequate, why don't we realise and abort before V1? Humans turn out to be bad at this, so not much use asking the pilots. Airbus have built planes that measure their own acceleration and warn if it seems too low. So maybe that's the future.
