And it sounds like turning the intelligent feature off and treating the packets as pure broadcast, just like ARP packets, would have fixed the problem. If the switch can't do that in the right way, it's not the protocol's fault.
I've seen this happen a few times in my life in production systems, designed by someone else. Overload a switch somehow and it goes straight in ludacris mode because of the topology. Properly configured networks suffer minor outages only in case of single device meltdowns.
And no matter how smart the peole on campus are, there will always be someone who cannot accept that someone else is more right. I have first hand experience of this since I have tunneled IPv6 at home and know pretty quickly if someone does not listen to ICMPv6 Packet Too Big -messages. Not the first time I contact people about it but so far the only one I have not been able to convince is exactly someone really smart on some campus somewhere. I wrote many emails and tried to explain that IPv6 allows MTU's as low as 1280 bytes and that ICMPv6 is a must allow protocol but nope.