Money was a big part of the problem. The whole point of making it out of carbon fiber was to make it light and therefore cheap to operate. He could have made a long DSV with plenty of room for passengers out of metal, the Aluminaut DSV was such a craft with proven performance, but then he would have needed to buy or rent a more expensive ship to operate it with.
Yep. There are a ton of incidents described in the report which all stink of penny-pinching. Probably one of the most obvious is reusing the titanium end cap components from the first submarine; this may have played a role in the failure of the Titan, as the mating surfaces may have been damaged or incompletely cleaned when rebonding them to the new hull.
Well, I for one enjoy being able to fly in airplanes. I'm glad nobody back in the day decided that flight wasn't something most Americans should be able to do.
On the related topic, people did wonder if Rush was the right person to be leading this project and numerous people raised governmental complaints. However, mostly due to staffing issues within the government they weren't handled in any appropriate amount of time and any entity with the ability to stop him didn't.
