I betcha if they left the seat out, its because adding them might have pushed the design past the limits for carrier ops. Lots of those cold war designs were marginal as heck, in one way or another.
According to a writeup I saw on that E2 broken cable, the cable had undergone maintenance and the valving wasn't reset correctly. So the cable ran out to the end without slowing it down so it hit the stops with the plane still moving, which was enough of a tug to part the cable at the hook.
Nice job flying the plane out of it, no question about it. If you look closely you can clearly see the pilot rotating to his best AOA and hold it there as it disappears below the deck.
I've been in a slightly similar situation where a student pilot picked the exact wrong time to rip the throttles to idle in a no-flap heavyweight approach that was already slightly slow and drug in, on a hot day. 14 second engine spool up time is not good when the weeds short of the runway are coming up at you. I had to milk it to the runway in ground effect without scraping the tail... made the runway by about ft. In my case the worst that would have happened would probably have been shearing the landing gear off on the approach end of the runway, not getting run over by a carrier
