that areas where fire abatement had been taken seriously were largely intact. Only places that allowed a lot of trees and other vegetation around houses had been destroyed.

Sensible landscaping will increase someone's chance of keeping his home. Unfortunately, it doesn't look that pretty to too many homeowners.

We are dealing with decades of poor policy but your attitude towards those suffering today in your two previous threads is what is reaping you scorn.

Few here could not voice chapter and verse (even if they have little background in forestry and resource management) on the regressive policies that have gotten us here today. It is a noteworthy subject for discussion, but it hardly does anyone good to be finger-wagged about it right now, all the while you are saying essentially to let Colorado burn because there are locales that are governed by RW policies and attitudes.

allow or even start regular fires under controlled circumstances (not during a drought for instance) to clear out the underbrush and ultimately make the forests healthier.

Zone those areas immediately around the forests in some way. Either ban construction or allow up with the caveat that you're taking a risk and there will be regular fires in your vicinity.

This pest is a native that kills lodgepole, ponderosa, sugar and white pines - perfect fuel for raging wildfires.

...which also has sometimes elusive practical applications.

Managing forests to reduce unwanted fuels is easy to say, but would involve spending billions of dollars on optimizing billions of acres of forest in ways that often had no financial return. And you'd still have fires every time there was a drought, and climate change stills threatens the whole thing.

Beetle-kill is often invoked as threatening devastating fires, but is far less of a problem than drought. Beetle-kill has been endemic and growing since 1996 (beginning in Canada), but has resulted in no devastating fires. Simply put - live and newly dead trees carry more fuel and burn more explosively than dead trees.

The rest is good idea, and more or less being applied in practice or in the works. The thing is - you still have fires every year, and in drought years you'll have larger fires. We tried complete fire control in the last century and it turned out to work pretty poorly.

Not to just give someone a hard time, but the whole "common sense" thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth - usually its followed by oversimplification or outright error.