Comment by dijit

I work in gamedev and I'm on your side in this.

But I should note that once you ship a product in this space there is a heavy emphasis on not breaking much. Changes are for the next milestone (seasons, service packs, new features). There's very rarely any emphasis on "fixing" something because it could introduce even more bugs and Producers prefer sitting on a stack of known issues than addressing them with more unknown ones. Since known issues have a known cost.

Until it gets so bad that you have to make health patches, we made such patches (and referred to them internally as "Sanity" patches)