The FAA has a tendency to punish deliberate acts or serious lack of judgement, i.e. "I'll fly under this bridge, it'll be awesome."

When mistakes happen by accident, they tend to give people lots of slack to encourage honest accounts so that they and the rest of the community can learn from the mistake. This is the reason behind things like the NASA form, which is sometimes seen as a "get out of jail free" card. You write a detailed account of what happened after certain kinds of accidents/incidents, and if they conclude that you weren't being too stupid, or it wasn't a repeat issue that you should have learned from, they'll skip certain minor enforcement actions against you.