The issue is that you think making sure compliance being in place is a "distraction". This is like devs saying writing test classes is a "distraction", or having an infosec team is a "distraction", or having seatbelts in cars is a "distraction".
I feel that is an unfair interpretation because there was one phrase spent on the word "distraction" and then a long paragraph included comparing stress tests to breakfast. If you feel breakfast is unimportant then more power to you I suppose, but I disagree.
Breakfast represents something like 10-30% of of a person's caloric intake, it is much more important than regulatory compliance in the financial system. We could adjust to poor compliance relatively easily (we did without formal compliance regimes for centuries). You seem to be underestimating breakfast.
This is part of why I like the analogy; something being important is different from whether it is a legal necessity. Making it a legal necessity is what brings in the complaints about costs, not the cost of doing the thing itself. The cost is in proving compliance under all possible conditions. The complying act, as the thread ancestor I first replied to noted, is often cheap and generally already done as good practice.
