Without this feature, or something like it, the DigitalOcean VPC offering is completely useless to me.

There's no way to intentionally move pirvate IPs around if/when hosts fail? Are you kidding? this a very common practice in managing clustered services.

I'm forced to send all traffic over public ipv4 and rely on firewalls for security, and use a public floating IP managed by automated scripts. But none of this traffic is really appropriate for public internet - and I'd rather not pay for the bandwith - these are all backend database services. Its just a silly setup and makes me long for better hosting privders.

yes. definitely.