I don't know that "easy to fry" is a fair generalization. In a home built unit, stuff happens, yes, but adding more stuff generally reduces the chances of success. It sounds like a
layer of plastic between his board and LCD would have helped here.
The
preassembled ones currently come with a layer of plastic between the LCD and the circuit board. They also do not have a bootloader and other changes and have not yet shown the flash flakiness seen in a stock arduino configuration. The data leads have 50kohms in series so it's hard to fry much of anything with that in the way. And a large cap with reverse polarity protection on the power leads make a reasonable supply circuit.