Well, the rules above ground are drafted for professionals with thousands of logged hours. We can either require that for everyone who wants to fly or we can draft simpler rules in height-confined airspace. Maybe we already have, in VFR flight levels, I don't know.
You can get a PPL with a minimum of 45 (40 in the USA I believe) hours total time. Hell, you can get a fAPTL and jump in a 747 with 250 hours experience (not likely in the current economic climate but still legal).
So, just to nit pick, you have to be neither professional nor have thousands of logged hours; indeed you can be a professional with hundreds of logged hours. Most flight instructors start in the 250-500 hours category just to cheaply hours build.
Also, we already have enough light aircraft crashes as it is; the ones that usually don't make the national news (UK here). Relaxing the rules would be devastating in my opinion, and remember when a plane crashes, there's the whole mess on the ground too - will it crash into a field or a house?
What I've said holds true for FAA and JAA pilots pretty much the same. Anyway, if you're buying one of these bad boys for $200k, I doubt the extra ~$8-10k for a PPL is going to bother you, although perhaps the time spent learning and revising for the exams would.