FWIW, I subscribe to this list and have read every post in this thread, and my system was killed because I didn't fix the file before a reboot out of my own laziness. It took me all of 2 minutes to fix my system. Could it have been prevented? Yes. Do I really give a shit that I had to fix it? No, because it was my own fault. Had this been one of the remote machines that I administer I would have been more careful when doing the upgrade and this wouldn't have happened.
I think of out all the options here, copying the current inittab to .pacsave and installing a new, working inittab makes the most sense. Then a user would at least have a chance to boot and read their logs to see what happened if they even notice there is a problem.
