Yes this would be nice. Or maybe the OOM system would have two other files, /sys/oom/kill_first and /sys/oom/kill_never which would solve the problem more dire

Yes this would be nice. Or maybe the OOM system would have two other files, /sys/oom/kill_first and /sys/oom/kill_never which would solve the problem more directly for the majority of cases. I should really send a patch rather than complaining ...