For me, as Lys pointed out earlier, characters past their Death Rating are dead. The things that can bring them back from that are SUPER magic, not just simple magic. At this point, you are dealing with a no kidding corpse. For me, I can't justifying how stitching up the wound is going to help them become not-dead.
If you want some real-world analogies:
- Life Check and Death Cheat are very much in the vein of defibrillator paddles. You've coded, you basically just died, but the intervention keeps you from actually becoming a corpse.
- Last Chance (Nethermancy) is like the "push 10 cc of <that drug thing> STAT." You've coded, the paddles didn't work, but there's a VERY brief window while you're dead that all the tissue is still health, and you can restart the systems.
- Last Chance Salve and any interventions by Questers of Garlan are no kidding "you brought us a cold slab of meat." There's no real-world analogy. The body has been shipped off to the morgue, game over, time of death. Pushing more fluids, giving antibiotics, suturing wounds - none of that matters, this is a carcass.
As to much of the rest of your post, my opinions are well known on the whackadoo damage output available in ED4 close combat, I don't really want to revisit it here.
Yep, it's unfortunate, if someone lets that hit through, there's a good chance that post maybe Circle 7, a fragile Adept or an Adept that has already sustained a decent amount of damage is at real risk of going down, and to an amount of damage that will keep them down, and that is truly unfortunate from a system perspective to me. Armor isn't going to keep up, the scaling function has failed. Your best bet is to focus on avoidance - Defense, the dodges (Avoid Blow, Steel Thought), staying out of range in the first place if you aren't build for combat, etc.
) imprisonment.