Re: Babs needs to walk again
First off, you're making the same mistake a lot of people do, thinking of TKJ as Oracle's "origin story" rather than looking at it as what it was, a standalone story which was intended to be Barbara's last. It wasn't meant to be a beginning, it was meant as an ending. Someone else came along and said "hmm, someone's broken some eggs here, let's try to make an omelet out of them", after the fact.
So let's look at that story, shall we? First, a female character judged by the writers and editors to be superfluous was attacked and brutalized in a deeply sexualized fashion, with her helplessness emphasized. This is done not to serve her story in any way, because her story was intended to be over. Instead, its purpose is to motivate the male characters and serve their exposition and development. Joker gets to show off his nature and motivations, Batman gets to serve righteous vengeance, and Jim Gordon gets to refuse to be broken and to be moral and take the high road by making the call to let the Joker live and call off the enraged Batman. What does Barbara get to do? Lie in a hospital bed and not even get her opinion asked, let alone avenge herself. It's not even made clear in the story if she'll live or die, she's literally that unimportant to the story. She's a complete non-agent, a nonentity even, a mere disposable tool to progress the male characters in the story by their reactions and responses to her victimhood. She's a throwaway character, discarded and forgotten.
There isn't a clearer case of WiR in all of comics. Just because someone came along after the fact and decided to use her again and take that story as a springboard does not redeem it. Nor does it offer closure or balance the scales for what happened to her, as she's still crippled and still has not taken any measure of vengeance against the Joker for what he did to her. When Batman was crippled, he got to get better and settle the score with Bane himself, coming back to full form to avenge his loss with a decisive victory. Barbara never got that story. Her triumphant comeback and delayed victory over her foe has yet to take place. And it's beyond long overdue.
Secondly, you're ignoring the fact that the Joker rarely kills someone when he can instead humiliate and break them, and make their survival more torturous for them than death would have been. Given the horrific injury and the sexual humiliation involved in the attack, it's very easy to argue that a weaker person would have broken under the trauma and viewed what happened to her as a fate worse than death. It's not the Joker's fault she was too strong to let it stop her, it really was the worst he could throw at her and a more brutal and creative attack than simply killing her would have been.