Did it actually end the game, or was it just the display showing up at the wrong time and the game continued as normal? If it's the latter, then that's not something they're going to jump to fix immediately since it's not critical to playing and completing a game.
Annoying? Yes. Critical? Nah.
It's called triage. You can only do so much in a release cycle, so you fix what you can while still satisfying the investors with forward progress and new features. You guys forget WGT has bosses that want to see consistent ROI. They contributed a lot more to the game than any of us have, and as stupid as it might sound, WGT has to answer to those guys first and foremost, and the user base comes second.
Otherwise the investors pull out and the game goes kaputz. That's just the sad state of software development nowadays (and it's everywhere, not just here). It's not that WGT doesn't care about you, it's generally the stakeholders who don't care about the customers. Instead they see "customer satisfaction" in terms of profit & loss. WGT has to try to make both factions happy, and that's not an easy task to undertake.
Stakeholders/Investors want to be impressed, not watch their investment get stale. To them, you get more money from new features than you do fixing old ones. There is never going to be a purely "bug fix release". Investors just won't stand for that.
I was told exactly the same thing at my job (large online sports apparel retailer). There's so many bugs on the website that just won't ever be fixed. With the notable exception of medical software, this is fairly normal.
It baffles me when people say "WGT is just in it for the money." Of course they are, this isn't a non-profit operation and they have people to answer to. If they weren't in it for the money there wouldn't be a WGT. I've seen games that are just simply cash farms, opening up new servers daily just to cash on that new server rush. WGT is nothing like that.
Can someone tell me where exactly are all these for-profit businesses that aren't in it for the money?