You're only hearing about this issue because they fixed it. And you know very well that every OS has had problems that are just as dumb from time to time.
Honest question, how does this particular problem differ from classic dependency hell? It sounds like exactly the same sort of issue I see on Linux blogs when e.g. a broken PNG display library causes crashes in a program that doesn't display PNGs (but uses a library that uses a library that does).
Its correct that there are similarities, but the difference in this case is that its a system-wide policy enforcing the use of a system-provided DLL that is causing the issue (everywhere) as opposed to your scenario being more of a userspace issue that, an admittedly skilled, user can get themselves out of .. In your case, I'd fix it with some hot LD_PRELOAD action - I'm not sure how I'd endeavour to address this on a production Windows system, however.
