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I'm sure it's taboo to say this on GC, but the problem is that NIC fraternities are largely wedded to this idea that the collegiate chapters are capable of self-government despite the fact that this has been proven untrue for the majority of them. SAE says it outright in their statement: "We acknowledge that many groups maintain a positive experience for their new members and that the experience may be beneficial to the development of members on some campuses. Unfortunately, the instances of programs that do not follow suit outweigh the ones that do." SAE's own documentation shows that they've disciplined more than 100 of their 250 chapters since 2007--and that doesn't include the ones who are doing things but haven't gotten caught, or--like with the Salisbury hazing case--ones where the university found the chapter guilty of hazing but SAE failed to act.
So fraternities' international offices create policies that are supposed to dictate how chapters should be run, and they hand down punishments when chapters are caught violating those policies, but they apparently fail to intervene effectively in that middle period where they could address hazing or alcohol problems before they've grown out of control, because the chapter is supposed to be in charge of governing itself. This is not a sustainable position, given rising insurance and settlement costs, and I think SAE's leaders realize it, even if their members don't. They already have the highest fraternity insurance costs per member in the country, and if they lead fraternities in deaths, they likely also lead them in pocket-emptying lawsuit settlements, too, so those costs are only going to grow. This is a good first step to reduce them, but unless they're going to back up the changes with changes in how things are enforced--field staff taking a more active role to root out hazing, a return of house parents, more direct involvement with campus Greek life staff, more of a willingness to close chapters with recurring problems (no matter how prestigious of a campus they're on), etc--then nothing will change. More direct HQ intervention is not going to be a popular change, so I can understand why so many fraternities are so hesitant to do it, but the bottom line is that it's going to be a necessary one at some point in the fairly near future in order to keep organizations alive.
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