Why is Poly1305 popular given its 'sudden death' properties? ECDSA has the undesirable property that if a key pair reuses a nonce in a signing operation, the cryptosystem experiences catastrophic failure in the form of private key leakage. I've heard this referred to as "sudden death" cryptography. Of course the PS3 misuse of ECDSA is probably the most widely publicised incident.

One advantage of DJB-advocated cryptosystems like Ed25519 is that they lack this weakness. The Ed25519 website states that "hash function collisions do not break this system."

A perfect implementation of ECDSA will be problem free, but since implementation flaws are inevitable, it seems preferable to use cryptography without huge exposed sharp edges.

This being the case, I am puzzled by the DJB's and other's advocacy for an authentication function that exhibits "sudden death" in the event of inadvertent nonce reuse.

Is the use of Poly1305 really informed only by performance? If so, why is this so crucial? The widespread use of e.g. HMAC suggests that MAC computation costs are tenable as they are and without pressing issue. I don't understand why Poly1305 is receiving such preference when it seems so dangerous. Can someone explain this?
At least in the case of NaCl, Poly1305's "sudden death" properties aren't much worse than XSalsa20's. With any stream cipher, if you reuse the same stream with two messages, then the XOR of the ciphertexts gives you the XOR of the plaintexts. So your security is already ruined by nonce reuse, whether or not you rely on Poly1305.