The Russians really know how to build good ejection seats for their fighters and good launch escape systems for Soyuz. Their Soyuz booster has had a very good track record over the decades with somewhere around 2,000 launches of all versions (mostly unmanned, of course) and a safety record over 96%. They had a couple manned abort situations that I'm aware of and the crew survived both times. NASA can't say the same.

It seems to me that investing in a really good launch escape system makes the whole "man-rating" argument almost moot. What you'd really need then would be sufficient sensors and processing power to detect a major anomaly in time to successfully abort. When it comes to launching and not exploding, both the Delta IV and Atlas V EELVs have a 100% success rate. The one Delta IV Heavy flight wasn't fully successful because propellant sensors caused premature shutdown but the vehicle did make orbit (just not the desired one).

That's certainly better than the Shuttle with two crews killed in less than 130 flights. The Shuttle also had several close calls including SSME premature shut downs and a severe electrical glitch during liftoff on one mission. In short, the Shuttle never was and never could be considered a remotely "safe" vehicle - if such a thing is even possible with manned spaceflight.

NASA is proposing spending a lot of money to build "The Stick." I can't help but wonder how that money compares to the cost of man-rating the EELVs. Is NASA's goal to build the most practical and reliable booster for the taxpayers' money or is it to justify keeping as much of the enormous Shuttle labor force on the payroll? While "The Stick" is an interesting design technically, it just doesn't seem the best booster for the taxpayers' money IMO. There's also the question of how reliable it'll be compared to the EELV designs. It seems they fixed the SRB gap seal problem following Challenger but they're talking about using an upgraded J-2 for the second stage. The J-2 was a good engine but there was at least one failure (2nd stage engine on Apollo 13) that I recall.

NASA is going to spend the money to build the launch escape system anyway, so that seems to weaken their argument against using the EELVs to launch the CEV.