Author's Note: This article has not been updated since initial writing. At least one significant change to my knowledge has occurred which changes the behavior in later versions. As of Caché 2018.1.6+/IRIS 2020.1.2+ versions, a code change (DP-405710) has resulted in Journal I/O Wait no longer counting the time the system spends waiting on QOS. Because of this, the failover risk regarding QOS and Journal I/O timeout is eliminated. Other system timeouts exist at larger timeout lengths which the QOS still may run afoul of (such as the Write Daemon timeout at 5 minutes), so excessive QOS timeouts are still discouraged.

This is still a problem, has there been any movement on this?

I'm not familiar with INSTFREEZE and INSTATHAW, can you describe where those scripts come from?
 

However, if these are calling into the database and ultimately call the ExternalFreeze and ExternalThaw methods, the permissions for running an ExternalFreeze are more strict than those for running an ExternalThaw, which may be the root of the difference as to why thaw is succeeding and freeze is failing.