If I'm not wrong, ja kernel patches detect a dead route by pinging the interface gateway. In my experience, in my environment (Italy), this is not enough to detect a dead gateway: we often get dead DSL links or very disturbed radio links. In both cases the interface gateway is up and running, so the uplink would not be detected as down. And this unfortunately doesn't happen here "less than once or twice a year": we don't have a very nice internet infrastructure here in Italy, in some rural places it can happen once a month.
About the RAID-0 analogy, it was just to let people better understand using a concept they are familiar with: I'm confident many Slashdot readers know what a RAID-0 is. And I still think the RAID-0 analogy is pertinent. If you don't have a mechanism to exclude dead uplinks, it's like losing a disk in a RAID-0 array: all your data is lost! In this case (almost) all of your LAN-to-WAN traffic is down. Actually you had a mechanism to exclude dead uplinks: ja kernel patches, they worked in your environment but, as I said before, not in mine.