This seems to be the core of your concern:
Quote:
Knowing that 35 % of Arc Flash incidents occur without human interaction and that many of the Arc Flash Analysis recommendations identified a multitude of "over dutied " circuit breakers which were never replaced.
I don't know where this statistic comes from and you are mixing results. IEEE 499 (Gold Book) or the newer version certainly has statistics on how many faults are arcing faults and that number sounds about right. But it doesn't indicate when they occur. So even though this might be true, it doesn't tell you that most of them probably occur when equipment is changing state, not just sitting there working or idle. So just walking by isn't a significant hazard and the 70E Committee has stated this numerous times. If a human isn't involved these aren't arc flash. Arc flash is a term applied to when humans are exposed to the heat of an arcing fault. So 35% of faults might be arcing faults but only a few of those are arc flashes.
So the entire focus is on addressing those activities where the "spontaneous" case does not apply. It is focused on the cases where either defective equipment or human error during certain activities occurs. That's why 70E-2015 in the "table" based methods has a table for whether or not the activity may pose a hazard and OSHA 1910.269 Annexes have a similar table. Just walking by is not one of those situations. With breakers that are maintained properly, and as I said the arc flash study is garbage if you don't maintain them properly, just operating them is also very unlikely to cause a problem and that's why 70E in the table version of the risk assessment doesn't require arc flash PPE.
As to over-dutied, this means that in the event of a bolted fault condition, it is beyond the breaker's design. Either the breaker (or bus bars) may simply fail to open at all, or it could literally fly apart from magnetic force involved. Without further information it's hard to say what will happen but either way we're talking about bolted faults which are NOT arcing faults. Arcing faults have significantly less fault current involved so breakers might be overdutied in the event of a dead short but might be sufficient to open and clear an arcing fault, if they are still working properly.
Finally, "category dangerous" does NOT EXIST anywhere in 70E. It is a totally fictitious and unscrupulous thing created by one or more software companies. There is a fine print note, NOT PART OF THE CODE, in 70E that mentions a 40 cal/cm2 "cutoff" that applied almost 20 years ago when the highest available PPE at the time was ATPV 40. Now the 100+ ATPV suits are readily available so that note is now just history. I put in the public input to delete it and in the 2018 edition it will be removed.
Second even the fine print note that does exist doesn't have any additional requirements at all in 70E. It just states that "additional caution" should be used which is obviously true even for anything above 1.2 cal/cm2. This is sort of like the "prohibited approach boundary" that was in 70E until a few years ago. 70E had an extra shock protection boundary but no additional requirements so it was removed. Similarly there are no additional requirements for "additional caution" so it is being removed.