What's the rationale of using ECDSA instead of RSA?
I'm not sure why you think RSA is much safer than ECDSA. As you can read here: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/3216/signatures-rsa-compared-to-ecdsa 

ECDSA offers same levels of security as RSA, but with a much smaller footprint. 

In fact, the more you increase the security, the larger the RSA keys become compared to ECDSA.  This makes RSA less fit for a system such as bitcoin which requires small packets to be sent around the network all the time (being peer-to-peer).