You don’t need a safety net if you have a signed signal from the customer to delete a file. Technical issues in that case could only lead to wrongly not deleting the file.
And yes, using GC for everything now was a shortcut and quite an inefficient one as well. I believe it was done to fix the issue with deletes when server side copy was used. It would be much better if they ran some logic on the satellite to determine which segments are fully deleted and still send that list to nodes.
With that in mind, I see the argument to pay for trash. But there are practical complications with that as Storj doesn’t know what’s in your trash. I guess they could keep paying for files for 7 days after they were deleted. But they could be in uncollected garbage much longer than that. So that doesn’t provide any additional incentive for them to fix the current issues.