Good to see BitPay is taking care of concerns.
Are your systems using version 0.7 or 0.8 bitcoind backends?
we were on 0.7 bitcoind (and still are)
the good thing about the client going into "safe mode" is that it alerts you to a potential fork so you can quickly reach consensus with the other players to determine which one you need to follow.
This is an excellent example of how mining is critical to bitcoin, and the lack of mining in other systems like Ripple would have a much tougher time dealing with forks.