Great response, thank you for taking my words in the spirit they were intended :) I battle hard to find approaches to my next features that will motivate me to actually get them finished too. I'm learning that this is a big factor in a programmer's experience. So I understand completely.
I tried fixing it initially but eventually gave up and put the whole development on hold for 6 months. Also note that the problem gradually got worse. In the beginning it wasn't such a big deal but eventually became post-apocalyptic when players had a hard time finding even the most basic resources.
Another aspect is the amount of support I had to take care of when the player base was at its peak. It almost made me burn out, consdering that it's a side-project that I'm not making any money of. So when this major bug started affecting the game and the active players began dropping it was almost a relief. I never expected that anyone wanted to play it to begin with. I just put it out there as soon as I had something playable.
So after a long hiatus the joy of rewriting the front-end made me motivated to work on it again. Perhaps not the best strategic move but it feels good to be back. :)