Personally I don’t think using it for safety and correctional purposes only will work – we see horses hang into the whip all the time and the best course of action when a horse hangs to get him to straighten up is to put the whip down and get both hands on the reins and pull them away from the direction they are hanging to.
If they go to the discretion of the Stewards then there would need to be a centralised professional body with probably a jockey or two on the panel presiding over each case and frankly I don’t see that happening either.
All the capitulation they have done through the years means that they have backed themselves very much into a corner in that they can’t up the number of strikes permitted (they don’t have the bottle to stand up to the usual suspects who shout loudest) and they won’t go back to not having a number of strikes and I don’t think they are quite at the banning of the whip stage…….yet but that really is the most likely outcome somewhere down the line.