Used to work at Linode, let's flip this on it's head:
-When the majority of abuse support dealt with was people angrily calling and asking about the fraudulent charges on their cards for dozens of Lie-nodes you consider putting caps in place to reduce support burden and reduce chargebacks.
At the time at Linode, if it was a known customer, we could easily and quickly raise that limit and life is good.
I've always wondered how Amazon dealt with fraud/abuse at their scale.
I don't think DO was wrong here to have a lock, but the post lock procedure seemed to be the problem.
I find it concerning that they have such a low threshold for triggering a lock. 10 droplets is hardly cloud scale.