As did hikermor.

There have been attempts to come up with a new metric which better describes the overall potential destructiveness of a hurricane. See for example Scientists Develop New Way of Classifying Hurricanes

The probelem is that even with a better scale, there are still many variables which won't be captured. For example, will the hurricane stall in place and dump huge rainfall in one area? Will the storm surge come at high tide or low tide?

In my humble opinion, what is really needed is the public and news media needs to have a better understanding and appreciation of statistical variation, and the inherrant uncertainty in ANY forecast. In my experience, most people are pretty clueless about this.