[Si Coe]

Its worth pointing out that this whole 'different shaped pack' thing is a bit of a myth. It didn't exactly take long to approve shorties - which are unlike the dimensions for sticks and saddle not the same as 6 Sub C NiMH's. Now there are cars out which can only use shorties.
All above board, all approved.
The dimension rules can be changed and are when people want them to be.

As for other points -

Remember we are talking about 1/10th off road here. Thats a class where we presently have more power than we can put down on the track, with miles more duration than we need. The rise of the shorty itself proves that better packaging in the car is actually more important than the roughly 25% drop in capacity.
We don't need cell/motor/chassis of the week to be competitive in this class. It still happens but thats because we are all sheep that flock to buy the new shiny stuff.
Yes this would change if we shifted to a different racing format - but then that is the sort of thing we would need to consider before making such a move. The present 'anyone can have a much power as they can handle and still last a race' thing is one of 1/10th offroads biggest strengths right now and it would be a big risk moving away from that.


In the event of an incident no lawyer is going to care if the cells that caught fire are on the BRCA list or not, because the test procedure is not an officially recognised standard. There are recognised standards for lithium polymer batteries, and as mentioned in the other thread one of the 'tests' for being on the approved list is the presence of paperwork to show they met those standards. Right now that looks like a win for the list, but there are cells not on the list that also have met those standards. A court would see no legal difference between those two, so no the list is not 'safer'. It is an easy way to spot safe cells though.