> I'm scratching my head and wondering if anyone in their right mind would ever play a crone.
Because you can name her Hagga!
Also crones start with death magic and if you up that a bit you will not suffer from disease for a couple of hundreds of turns, unless exposed to decay. The main effect of the old age is that she has age reduced stats (but her basic stats are upped to represent her stats if she was young).
> You call crone back, but she's still dying and she's still diseased, so she dies again...
Disease always goes away when you are recalled or reborn from immortality. Only mister disease himself (T'ien Ch'i hero) gets diseased immediately once reborn.
> I suppose the way to think of it is that she is not a god yet,
There are plenty of gods that dies in the myths and religions of our history. Nothing spectacular about that
