My impression about the "wake of death" - and certainly my experience when I was getting it - is that it tends to happen when you wake a device from sleep after charging it, then disconnecting it.
By default, coming off the charger triggers a power managment vibration event, and that event was causing the UI to lock up. For me, that vibration was not actually causing a crash -and I wish it had. Rather, it made the whole system freeze up, with the display flickering on and off briefly when I tried to power the device on.
Midnight is based on the Anthrax 3.2.x kernel, which is an actively developed beta kernel. My advice is to sign up for an account at anthrax-kernels.us so that you can decouple the kernel from the rom. I'm s-on but have been using 4ext with smart flash enabled and have been having good luck.
Also worth a look is the init.qcom.post_boot.sh script developed out of Negalite. Negalite tracks the Anthrax kernel as well and their post boot script is well-documented. That script is where I originally found the loopysmoothness tweaks. I ultimately broke the loopy tweaks into their own init.d script.
xdank, I'm noticing that the Negalite script, when run manually from an adb shell, throws fewer errors than the one I tested last with Midnight. It might be worth taking a look?
There is a standalone installer for that init script called "negalite-battery_saver-v1.zip" but I don't know if that ROM is linkable from outside the anthrax-kernel site.
I'll write the author a note and ask.