Marine evacuation chutes are perfectly safe if you know what you are doing, they are fitted on some passenger ships, shipping companies love them because they can have an evacuation excercise where they can evacuate everyone in 30 minutes which is still a SOLAS requirement for passenger vessels even though everyone knows that it simply would not be possible in reality.
I have used a couple of different MES systems and they are actually quite good, but even as a realatively young and fit (by cruise ship passenger standards anyway) seafarer, who had been trained and briefed on what to expect, it still took a lot for me to get over my fear of the unkown the first time and jump into the chute. When shipping companies stage these excercises they use people who have been trained, they rehearse in advance and they get the required number of people into the rafts in the required time frame, in reality you would have people so scared that they would either refuse to go down, or worse, would panic inside the chute and get stuck, blocking it for everyone else.
Freefall boats are fine for cargo ships and many have gone that way as they are safer to launch and recover, but wouldn't work on passenger ships due to the numbers required and the fear factor again.
The other issue is tht cruise ships use tenders to ferry passengers ashore in ports where the ship has to anchor. The boat which fell from Thomson Majesty was a tender boat (which also doubles as a life boat), so no matter what kind of evacuation system you have, there will always be boats on falls.
