I personally think that the best solution is simple: change the deduction for falls from a set point value to a percentage. That way you still get credit for the harder jumps *IF* you execute them correctly, but you don't have athletes courting serious injury by deliberately putting in jumps that they know they are unlikely to land, just for the sake of points. If you want to take the chance, then fine, but there's a price if you blow it.
Example: look at the Lutz, considered the second-most-difficult jump type. A single Lutz has a technical base value of .6, a double Lutz is 2.1, a triple Lutz is 6.0, and a quad Lutz is 13.6. The maximum technical deduction on a properly-rotated jump is 3 full points. That means that a perfect triple Lutz can potentially earn you 6 technical points, while an absolute face-plant quad Lutz is still worth 10.6 points as long as you don't under-rotate. (FWIW, when Nagasu fell on that triple Axel in the short, she did so because she went in too fast and OVER-rotated it. She came close to managing a quad rotation in the aerial phase of the jump, but of course, she couldn't have landed that.) If the system were changed to instead deduct a percentage for falls, say 50% for example, a perfect triple Lutz would still be worth 6, but that face-plant quad Lutz would drop in value to 6.8, and trying it for a mere .8 advantage wouldn't be worth the risk for most skaters who were not reasonally sure of landing it. This would also be more encouraging for Juv-level skaters who mostly do single jumps. Right now, a fall on a single takes you into negative value territory, while a 50% deduction on a single would still gain you some small value for trying.
As a parent with a skater who is about to move to Juvenile level (the level at which most clubs switch over from using the ordinal-6 scoring to the IJS model that you see in major competitions), what I can tell you is that repetitive stress injuries are worse now than they were a few years ago, and we see a lot more skaters on crutches and wearing back braces. I know of 3 skaters under age 12 in my daughter's club who are sidelined right now with serious stress fractures. The Russian-style emphasis on early jumping may produce champions, but it also breaks down growing young bodies. In the US we don't have universal health care, and the average family of a skater already puts out a huge amount of money on training. I know promising young skaters who have had to give up the sport because the addition of nasty medical bills to what was already a financial strain was the straw that broke the camel's back.
I think that THAT is probably the reason why commentators think that it will take a long time for US women to catch up using a Russian-style system. USFS gives promising skaters grants when possible, but those are usually along the lines of a new pair of skates, not the ongoing cost of a coach, and certainly not the cost of extensive medical treatment. American figure skating coaches nearly all are self-employed; they cannot afford to have too many of their skaters off the ice, because if they are, the coach is not getting paid. There is a reputation cost as well, because no matter how many champions you produce, if your injury rate is too high, most parents will avoid you like the plague, and USFS also places emphasis on limits that prevent avoidable injuries. This means that American coaches make it a point to try to minimize risk of serious injury, especially in younger skaters. It won't be until a new generation of coaches (who have always known the new system) comes up that that level of risk will become standard, if it ever does, given health-care costs here.