Right now, I want to fix the firefox logo only to avoid the trademark danger, but it should be obvious it’s not something “where nothing can go wrong”. It might be offensive or illegal for someone, or even just suboptimal for a particular display device, so I don’t think debian should give up the freedom to fix these sort of things. We can’t take into account uncertain future outcomes, but this is pretty obvious because we’ve seen similar things before. The freedom to edit artwork is useful.

A long-term success is better than a short-term one. A pragmatist doesn’t mind working sometimes. Free replacements don’t appear just because the non-free isn’t in debian, but it helps to point out the problem and encourage attention. The debian approach could be described as long-term pragmatism: solving problems forever, not just a quick-fix for now. For the short-term, you have other tools.