Absolutely. I didn't say never do it... just that it doesn't make sense to me most of the time.

Tom is Mr. Oracle, so I am not shocked that he's a big advocate of using that platform. But I don't like the straw man argument that anything that isn't managed by an Oracle DBA is automatically flawed and unreliable. Give me a break... Robust auditing, backup, professional management, etc can be delivered anywhere. (Or f'ed up on an Oracle platform)

That said, it's a business decision -- somebody, somewhere has probably justified putting user home directories on an Oracle database.