Not really, he's using bitcoin core... Core will rebroadcast his transaction if it's restarted. When he abandons his transaction, or zaps his wallet, core will no longer rebroadcast
Also, after zapping or abandoning, it'll be much easyer to re-use the unspent outputs when creating a new transaction with a higher fee.

Your approach was OK tough, you're right: if the transaction is improperly propagated, the OP has a slim chance of getting his tx in a block anyways, but that was actually the thing i was aiming at in the first place.