The great thing with Richter is that on the one hand, I don’t like how he chained up Dragon, but on the other hand, he did that quite early in her development and maybe just died before he could reevaluate the necessity of those restrictions. He might’ve been not nearly as paranoid on the subject as Dragon thinks he was, but we’ll never know because he’s, well, dead.
Yeah, he could easily have ended up loosing the chains a bit if Leviathan hadn’t done what Leviathan does best: fuck things up.