Hi,
That is the correct way to determine if a version enabled table is using compression or not. It might be some other table or tablespace property that is causing the same error to be raised. It's hard to know exactly without the full table DDL. If the dba_tables query had returned ENABLED for that column, the internal Workspace Manager operation would have been to set the column as unused instead of dropping it which would have avoided that error. This behavior was updated in 12c to always set the column as unused in all cases. As a workaround on 11.2.0.3, you can use ignore_last_error to skip the dropping of all the metadata columns (version, nextver, delstatus, ltlock and createtime/retiretime if history is used). Then after DisableVersioning completes, you can manually issue the set unused column DDL for each of the columns.
Regards,
Ben