It is said the Shuttle is man-rated....But it is built with the orbiter alongside the external tank, covered with 28,000 fragile tiles and has no rapid escape system at liftoff....And because of those things, 14 persons died...

OTOH, none of the Ariane family rockets are called man-rated and yet, none have exploded on the launch pad or even near it at liftoff. Even the first Ariane 5 launch, had there been a capsule on its top, with an escape tower, the loss of balance of the rocket would have left a few seconds of reaction time available to theoretically save a crew.
I remember a Titan III launch from Vandenberg in 1986 and a Soyuz launcher from Plesetsk in 2002 which exploded without warning not 10 seconds after liftoff....This could have been lethal to a crew even with an escape tower.
The Soyuz T10A cosmonauts were lucky the incident occured at the launch pad and a few seconds were available to save them.

Anyway, man-ratedness is a subjective and a relative notion and nobody can ever say how reliable a rocket is until it has been used hundreds of times. Maybe such a notion contributes more to the problem than it helps with the solution.