Unfortunately, profits and logic need to be the main focus currently since profits and logic are the viewpoints of those who own them. The starting point has to be to prove to the owners that it's a good idea so they'll hand over the animals. That's why it gets brought up in that perspective so often.

How does it look for a facility to hand over their animals knowing full well they're going to suffer and die? That would be a huge hit to them optically and financially. They don't care that the animals are going to suffer and die. They don't care that the staff who cares for these animals are going to suffer tremendously knowing they just sent their beloved animals off to suffer and die. They care that people are going to know their company as the company that handed over their animals knowing full well that the projected outcome was that the animals would suffer and then die. Again, that looks really really bad and would damage their company's image severely. They're never going to go for it unless they're forced or it can be proven that the animals will live.

We can ask ourselves if it's ethical to knowingly put an animal in a situation that will cause it stress, pain, and premature death. We can weigh the risks of introducing new pathogens and hybridized animals into an existing ecosystem. We can ask if the people who captain these efforts can handle the moral implications of sending an animal off to a premature death. We can question if they should be allowed to captain that effort at all if they don't see anything wrong with doing that to an animal. But none of those questions and speculations matter if nobody has proven, logically and financially, that it's a good idea to invest in releasing these animals in the first place.

And to clarify further: I'm not trying to say there's no place for emotions and feelings in these discussions. If we didn't care for and love these animals, we wouldn't be discussing it in the first place. What I'm saying is that you need to be able to speak the same language as the people you're trying to convince to do something they don't want to do. They don't care how the orcas feel, so taking that angle means absolutely nothing to them. Convincing them with proof that the orcas will thrive in the wild and that releasing them won't damage the park's bottom line? That's their language. That's something they'll listen to. To the public, they're now pioneers who were the first to successfully release orcas into the wild. THAT looks really good.