Larry, the argument to counter my argument has been that a free-fall isn't survivable anyway except by dumb luck -- so don't worry about it.
Instead, the argument goes, survivable accidents are those in which the rotor and control system continue working. In those cases, the pilot's best strategy is to pull back on the stick and use a vertical descent to cause a frame-level "soft splat." We know these are survivable in Bensen-style gyros because many of us have survived them. The gyro's vertical speed with an intact rotor and zero forward airspeed is on the order of 20 mph.
In that case, it doesn't matter whether the engine is in front of, or behind, the pilot, since it and the rest of the mass of the gyro have zero horizontal speed. What matters instead is the ability of the frame to collapse progressively in the vertical axis, within the space between the pilot's bottom and the aircraft's bottom.
This argument takes into account the difference between a typical FW crash -- involving a stall, loss of pitch control and a nose-down re-entry -- and a gyro that won't stall in the FW sense, and therefore retains pitch control.
Of course, a tractor gyro can be designed to have vertical crash-worthiness, too -- to go along with its naturally better frontal crash-worthiness.