Considering both recent US vehicle losses have been on re-entry, I feel NASA is vindicated on being ultra-conservative around that stage.

So anomalies that might be acceptable during ascent would be unacceptable during decent.

Personally? I'm glad Boeing launched.

I wish they were perfect technically, but I also realize that an infinite amount of time and money doesn't protect against unknown-unknowns.

IMHO, they should be operating more like SpaceX (and the earlier days of the US space program) -- using calculated risk and engineering to decide when it's reasonable to do an inherently risky thing, when doing so is needed to move the entire program forward.