You really need to get up to speed with the event before commenting on it, there's a very good writeup in the form of BIP50.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...
The issue has nothing to do with a particular transaction or block, it was going to fail anyway and just happened to be triggered by a large block. The oversight meant that all 0.7 clients were inconsistent with one another depending on the history of the node and how long it had been operating.
> No sane person says "An important feature of the Bitcoin Protocol is that conforming clients MUST REJECT any Bitcoin transaction which would exhaust the default number of locks available to the Berkeley DB."
Nobody did say that, the failure was implicit not explicit.
> Several hours of transactional history got wiped out.
No it didn't, it was replaced with a slightly different history, or history remained the same, depending on which side and which client you happened to be running at the time.