To me, stuff like this is a powerful argument for using open-source software (or at least software which you can access the source for), whenever possible. When things go very wrong, at least you can dig into the source code and try to fix it.
It's certainly an argument for having source access. For OS / "platform" level bugs it's no panacea however - you may very well need to keep your workaround, either because you can't rely on end users upgrading to the latest version, or simply need a stopgap until you finish the patch, submit the patch upstream, address all the issues brought up in the review, have it integrated into the next stable release, have it trickle downstream into the stable releases of individual distros, etc etc etc...
