For 36 of the 41 years of my working life I worked for 2 large American Automotive Engineering Companies & for 23 of those 36 years I worked in the Purchasing Depts buying raw materials & components which ended up being supplied to most of the motor manufacturers in Europe as safety critical products. The classification safety critical meant that the engineering specification was set to an extremely high level & the purchasing people had to liaise very closely with engineering, quality control & logistics, both in our own company & also at the customer in order to ensure that all safety critical parts were supplied to the exact specification with no room for error, after all not being melodramatic about it, the failure of a safety critical part could end up with somebody being killed.
Although I didn't purchase tyres they would also carry the safety critical classification & be subject to extremely rigorous test procedures covering everything that a tyre will be subjected to during its working life & like yourself I believe that there are far more critical reasons to buying a tyre than whether it looked good or not.
Cheers.