Pretty much every engineer on the Windows team does this type of work. When you have 1+ billion computers with an infinite combination of peripherals and environments (what language, what apps are running, etc.), it becomes a game of statistics and prioritization.
I don't think that is true. If they had that many developers burning down performance issues then bugs like this would (IMHO) be getting fixed earlier. Anecdotally it sounds like a lot of customers are hitting this bug and I'd love to know whether it is known, being investigated, or just noticed now.
I'm sure it has been showing up in their start-menu telemetry.
