Can't it be both? Get the "quick win" out of the way while working on the hard stuff, which will take a lot longer?
There are chokepoints with limited resources. I have a 60 day backlog on some things, but the stupid wifi EC jumped to the top of the pile and people wanted a 7 day turnaround. Which would be fine, if anyone cared why there was a 60 day backlog and wanted to fix that, but once the sacred cow got through it was back to the status quo. Just my $0.02 but quality of life shouldn't take priority over life safety, so if we can find funding and resources so that Bloggins can surf facebook at sea, than we should be able to make sure basic safety systems work before they go to sea. Right now the paradigm is we have to work to show the ship is too unsafe to go anywhere, instead of having to prove it's safe to leave the wall, which is pretty ass backwards. We're working on that on the technical side, but the operational side is really more interested in trending tweets and dog and pony shows.
The only difference between a lot of the USN collisions and fire events and our own is they have a much larger sample size, so their odds are better for that bad initiating event, but basically we're in the same/worse boat when it comes to the actual outcome. The BHR type scenario could easily happen to any of our ships.
Having said all that, the MCDVs are generally in better shape than the CPFs, but can see those getting tied up before the CPFs or AOPs when we hit the wall on the crew shortage side. Waiting for a few CPFs to 'self retire' though, and we're seeing defects that are taking them out of the ops cycle for 6 months - 1 year for repairs already. Just crossing fingers that it happens without folks getting hurt; we got pretty close with ATH and PRE, and in some respects they were in better mechanical shape at 40+ years than the frigates are at 25-30 years (due to the old baseline refits they got for the first 20-25 years of life).