The first time this happened, it was the luck of the draw. Freak accident. Could have happened to anyone, right? So, inspect the engines and let's move on. But that's not really what happened.
What happened is that Southwest, and most of the other carriers operating that engine, pushed back on the proposed AD, asking for an increased timeframe to comply with the inspections. Was that a "foolhardy bean counter mistake?" Well, not foolhardy from the bean counter's perspective - That's a bean counter's job, and that's the reason an airline or any other company exists: To make a profit. But, the airlines are in a risky business that has been made very safe by the regulators. For reasons we're not privy to, possibly including the beancounter pushback, the proposed AD was not finalized and the whole matter was put on the back burner...
... Until now.
Now, we have a dead person, which raises the level of scrutiny. We also have the second event occurring on the same airline, which is a statistical improbability. Near as I can tell, there are well over 17,000 CFM56-3/-7B engines installed on 737s worldwide, and Southwest operates about 1400 of them total. So, only about 1 in 13 of these engines is on a Southwest plane. The first "event", it's a dart throw. Could happen to anyone. The second event, on the same airline, in those proportions, means we're talking less than 1% chance that this is just the luck of the draw. While I have no reason to doubt Spike or anyone else talking about Southwest's maintenance being good, even good organizations make mistakes - and this does, IMO, also warrant increased scrutiny of Southwest's particular treatment of these engines.
Finally, while people say that even if the AD took effect as originally proposed, the second event would have occurred within the original 12 months allotted for the inspections and thus may not have been caught, it would have been most of the way through the 12 months and Southwest management surely would not have allowed planes to be grounded at the end of the 12 months for lack of inspection, so we can assume that if this particular fan blade's defect is something that could have been caught with the proposed inspection, there's probably an 80%-90% chance that this engine *would* have gone through the inspection already and that this passenger would still be alive.
We didn't get to this level of safety in the airline business by not looking at these things. We got here by examining these things in great detail and learning from them. Let's keep that up, not say "well it was a freak accident, and it only killed one person." What if that one person was YOUR wife, or your kid's mother?
I didn't specify an emotion.
But Paul has brought up some good points and it doesn't seem like people are talking about those points.