What if ethics regulation actually fostered ethics?

A lot of the complaints about ethics procedures are due to the one-size-fits-all model that universities roll out that is based on sciences and seems disproportionate particularly for humanities. I remember supervising a dissertation in history; the student wanted to conduct a secondary analysis of oral history interviews held in a public repository (so not conduct original interviews), but had to fill out a complete form that was basically one that senior social scientists conducting massive surveys would have to complete. I looked at it myself and would have struggled to complete it all, and it was some online system with very little flexibility that was set up for one type of research but everyone else was expected to do it as well. And there was little institutional guidance or anyone you could phone to speak about it. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating no ethics procedures, but rather systems and bureaucracy that is more proportionate and adjusted to the type of research being conducted.