Q: Oracle 7.3.2 and OFA (what gives?)

I am not going to even get into why the hell Oracle changed OFA by putting an /app directory name in the structure.

We made a "soft" link from their NEW directory structure to our OFA, which of course was good until 7.3.2.

When I set ORACLE_HOME to /home/oracle7/product/7.3.2, we get the following error when starting up the database:

ORA-00205: error in identifying control file '/home/oracle7/data/test02/dbf/control01.ctl' ORA-09782: sfifi: another instance has the same database mounted.

A look at the udump file reports:

Instance 'test02:/home/app/oracle/product/7.3.2' has the database mounted already.

However, when we set ORACLE_HOME to /home/app/oracle/product/7.3.2, it works fine.

Why is this happening? Has Oracle somehow "forced" or hardcoded their new OFA structure into the control files?
It seems like it is now OIA (for "inflexible")

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