Completely safe as long as the block of metal was in place. So you couldn’t just prevent the machine from putting out that much energy, you had to prevent it from doing that without the block in place.
The earlier model that the 25 replaced was all mechanically interlocked. The belief was that software provided that same level of assurance. They performed manual testing but what they weren't able to do was reach a level of speed and fluency with the system to result in the failure modes which caused the issues. Lower hardware costs equals higher profit...
