It seems necessary to acknowledge that A Death in the Family would have proceeded exactly the same way except for the final panel had the fans who called in voted the opposite way. The death would simply have been Jason's mother. Furthermore, the Batman editorial team had already decided to remove Jason Todd as Robin since he wasn't working out with readers. He could have survived, but he wouldn't have been Batman's sidekick.
The details of that story are indeed annoyingly shoddy. My personal peeves include how the text tells us, as I recall, that people in Lebanon speak Farsi while the Joker as Iranian ambassador speaks Arabic.
What's more interesting than that story is what the Batman team made of it. Yes, folks got a little sick of Bruce Wayne lamenting his dead son for fifteen years, but that death became a major part of the mythology, affecting every member of the family and others they came across. (Remember when Impulse asks Robin why his extra costume is in the glass case--is it all stinky?)
It could be interesting to think what the alternative would have been if fans had voted the other way. Would Jason have been crippled? Stayed in the Mideast doing charity work? Hunted down diplomat's sons suspected of rape? Turned to a life of crime? Disappeared from continuity like Aunt Harriet until someone had a better idea? We'll never know.
As for Jason's escape from his coffin, again we're looking at an editorial mandate. The editors accepted Judd Winick's proposal that Jason be brought back from the dead. How that was accomplished--with the awkward Hush overlap, Superboy-Prime, the coffin--was secondary to what stories that change could have produced.
In retrospect, that resurrection was probably also tied to the planned death of Dick Grayson in Infinite Crisis, which would have opened up a space in the Batman family for Jason: the new Nightwing. Much of Brothers in Blood makes no sense unless we imagine Jason in Dick's place. (The rest simply makes no sense at all.)