I could see the argument here. The issue is that it’s not really possible to tell whether the database is unavailable because the server is down or the network is just taking a long time to respond. So the best that we could do is timeout and throw an error like “unable to connect to the database in a certain amount of time” (which is what the status json call does).
That being said, you generally should be able to specify timeouts for transactions using the “setTimeout” transaction option. I could be wrong, but I think it’s possible that the “getReadVersion” command doesn’t honor that timeout if specified, which if that’s true, then that’s a bug. But by default, our timeout is “unlimited”, which I suppose one could disagree with. One issue with using our timeouts, though, is that the error that gets returned is “transaction_cancelled”, which can also happen if you cancel the transaction yourself (rather than something like “transacion_timed_out”). So, your mileage may vary.