iPhone native alarm clock issues/suggestions

Within the past two weeks, I have had at least two occurrences where my alarm clock failed to make any sound resulting in me oversleeping. After waking up, I noticed that the alarm as going off but not producing any sound or vibration. This is a relatively new issue, but I cannot afford for this to happen again. Additionally, is there any way to make the alarm clock more difficult to silence? As it stands, I have inadvertently hit a button when picking up my phone from the nightstand resulting in turing the alarm off--which is less than ideal. I have a few questions:

1. Why would this randomly happen after using the native alarm clock for 3+ years without issue?
2. Are there any settings or options available to make it more difficult/involved to silence the alarm given that it currently seems to silence when I simply pick it up (which I can easily do in my semi-conscious state)? If not, how do I request that these features be made available?
3. Unrelated to basic functionality, but why does the iPhone provide me with an option to "pick a song" as my alarm tone but refuses to actually play the selected song? Instead, it defaults to the stock alarm tone. Why provide this option which clearly does not work or restrict choices to those that will work (and/or provide criteria for song selection which will work correctly). Does anyone have any insight in regard to this issue?

I have used 3rd party alarm clock apps, all of which work well other than the fact that if the app is inadvertently closed out, the alarm fails to ring. I prefer to use one that ALWAYS works and does not have to run in the background to operate correctly and that requires a little effort to turn it off/silence it. Additional feature which would be nice is to be able to select a song or tone of my choosing.