@doktornotor:
If there was a working fsck, the journaling would help with some cases of unclean unmount/hard reset. Sadly, the fsck is totally borked and produces a giant kaboom in that case.
Only with crap flash (though it's certainly very bad in that case). On a SanDisk CF in an ALIX, and a SanDisk SD in an APU, they survived a thousand power cycles each left rw mounted, SU+J, with some writing happening when power was lost.
I took an affected CF card that fsck couldn't fix, dd'ed it to an img and booted it up in KVM, and fsck cleaned it just fine. Same when dd'ing it to another CF, was fine. Something screwy going on there with the problem flash, but didn't bother digging any further after confirming it doesn't happen minus SU+J.