It takes active work to do that but not to manually approve zillions of individual installations?

The zillions of individual installations probably aren't actually getting approved, manually or otherwise.

Not if the purpose of the regulations is to thwart them, no. But those are the rules that ought not to be.

Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.

Suppose that it isn't literally impossible to affect what the rules are and then if we're going to attempt it we need to determine what they ought to be.

"Need."

If you want the rules that exist and the rules that ought to exist to get closer together, do you not need to reckon what they ought to be?

Well, if you don't have any such compass, your efforts will be at best ineffectual. But an even more likely reason your efforts will be ineffectual is that the change you want to make is to a point outside the possibility space determined by the internal incentive structures of the institution.

Analogously, you might reckon that the best place for a nickel mine would be on 16 Psyche, because that's where the largest surface nickel deposits are. Or you might reckon that it would be good for an interpreter to give an error when the user attempts to run an infinite loop. But, lacking an interplanetary spaceship or a solution to the Halting Problem, these calculations are of little value.

The most effective response I've found to regulations that harm me is to leave.