I’m just guessing, but maybe to them it’s more egregious to miss a fence than it is to rub one; their line of thinking might be that if the penalty isn’t stiff enough, people will be too casual about actually getting their horse’s shoulders & hips over the question.
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I was editing my post above when my computer crashed. 
I get that, but it takes a bit more than a “rub” to activate the pins doesn’t it? It sure looked like that watching Badminton.
Some horses really knocked the fences without the frangibles coming into play.
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The big advantage of unequal penalties is that you can easily look at a scoring sheet and tell what happened. I don’t want the penalties for the two to be equal for that reason.
The problem is that sometimes frangibles deploy and it looks like little more than a tap or is snagged with the hind end, and that’s a small problem which one could argue deserves small penalties. But sometimes a frangible deploys when otherwise horse and rider would have tumbled end over end, and that to me is much worse than almost-not-jumping a fence. Tough to consider those the same magnitude of error, but also tough to split them without introducing subjectivity into xc judging (which I think nearly everyone would agree we do not want).
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I am pretty sure there is an article out there that debunks this. They activate based on a given force applied on one singular impact. Say the force needed is 100 N, its not cumulative over 10, 10N impacts. The pins do not “store the forces” in say the same way a bridge with a fault or crack would slowly degrade and possibly fail with minimal weight.
Of course if frangibles are not properly replaced or inspected this absolutely can happen.
