I really want to know why labs don't stack. As a professonal technologist with considerable development experience I would find it educational to hear the justification for letting this bug slip through dozens of patches.
Let me put it this way. On the development projects for which I've worked, a major purpose of "next release" was to fix all known bugs considered worthwhile. In that context, the only justification for letting this thing slide so long is that the bug is not considered worthwhile to fix. This argues either a) the developers have no idea what players care about, or b) the cost to fix the bug is enormous. Either way, I think we deserve an answer after all this time.