Jeff,
Thanks for the note. Yup, I've performed that (adding a d/f and 'fooling' it to perform recovery on the new file) with old traditional hot backups in the past. The process is somewhat akin to standby database maintenance in 7.3.4 days..

Anyway, that's exactly what I told the guy in Oracle support as well. But he claims that one can't do this directly through RMAN. (It is another matter that support person didn't know that such a recovery was even possible! hehe..).

RMAN still has some ways to go before it can be the 'plug n play' tool that Oracle claims it is.

- Anand