I was a DB2 DBA in a former life and I agree with you. If the database gets itself into a twist the vendor needs to fix it. It should not be possible for an end user to cause a server outage. Plain and simple. Worst case the server should do a rollback with an error message.

This sounds like the deadlock (two processes contending for the same resource) detection was not updated to handle this new situation. Oracle certainly needs to know about it.

Have fun,
Carl Forde