I've never seen that particular bug before, but the whole thing sounds totally plausible. Since it only manifests in Fermi, it's likely an arch issue. I'm guessing the workaround in the driver was deemed to messy/expensive compared to the one in the application.
I'll take a cursory glance at the issue, but if you've seen NV devs discuss it externally, it's probably well known internally, like closed as WNF.
I totally see where all sides are coming from, though:
* NV: Why spend resources fixing old architectures when it's easy to workaround at application level.
* Devs: Why spend resources supporting some obscure old HW that doesn't work right.
* Users: Why spend money replacing perfectly good HW, because NV/devs are lazy?
The more time passes, the less likely the first two are to do anything about it; and in time the number of users with those cards drops below epsilon. The easiest option is to just get HW that works with the SW you need - like you did.
I hope you are right, but there is not enough transparency to tell. From the discussion it sounded like modern hardware will behave the same, and maybe they'll try to amend the standard.
I didn't feel like betting $100's to find out if it hits on new hardware, but you can readily reproduce it on ElementaryOS with the 500's. You have to manually install the binary drivers with the ubuntu/debian proprietary driver tool, since ElementaryOS recommends the opensource ones.
This isn't the only distro that hit it, just the one I landed on in the end.
Anyway, for me the easiest option was to switch to open source drivers (where this kind of thing has a better track record of being fixed), and Nvidia is a non-starter there.
I'll take a cursory glance at the issue, but if you've seen NV devs discuss it externally, it's probably well known internally, like closed as WNF.
I totally see where all sides are coming from, though:
* NV: Why spend resources fixing old architectures when it's easy to workaround at application level.
* Devs: Why spend resources supporting some obscure old HW that doesn't work right.
* Users: Why spend money replacing perfectly good HW, because NV/devs are lazy?
The more time passes, the less likely the first two are to do anything about it; and in time the number of users with those cards drops below epsilon. The easiest option is to just get HW that works with the SW you need - like you did.