in violation of the bitcoin protocol's founding principle that greater hashing power always wins a dispute.
It was never a founding principal for greater hashing power to resolve hard forks. Hard forks by definition can't EVER be resolved by hashing power. If a single node remains on an incompatible fork it exists as a parallel implementation of Bitcoin. Creating a precedent for using hashing power to fork the network is horribly dangerous and will lead to intentionally putting bugs into the codebase to force a fork for profit.
The decision prevented thousands of 0.7 users suffering crashes as their wallets choked on the offending block. This would have forced users around the world to stop dithering and upgrade to 0.8 immediately. So? What would have been wrong with that?
You are completely uninformed. v0.7 nodes didn't crash they simply rejected the block. The risk is that v0.7 nodes would be vulnerable to attacks by double spends, 51% attacks and accepting newly generated coins from the incompatible v0.7 generation blocks.
The rational for rolling back to v0.7 was to prevent massive chaos, and loss of confidence and scammers and fraudsters looted the users of running older nodes. Nobody is saying we will remain on BDB forever but the transistion can be better managed.
A v0.81 can be released which uses the new db format but prevents incompatible blocks. older version users can be strongly encouraged to upgrade to the new version and warned of potential risks in staying with incompatible older version. Where a vast super majority (not of miners but of ALL stakeholders, users, exchanges, merchants, service providers) are on the new platform a final critical warning can be released notifying users of older version they face significant risk of being forked away if they don't upgrade and then the incompatible block rules can be introduced.
TL/DR a planned transition instead of a "fork it and if people get fucked in the chaos, well too bad" attitude. Which do you think will destroy trust in the Bitcoin network?