Those are indeed common issues in our industry. However, in this specific case, PowerDNS specifically calls this out on their support section of their page: "Many (large) developments in PowerDNS have been funded by operators that wanted to expedite the authoring of the features they needed."[1]
Also, carrier grade support does indeed sound expensive for a small shop. Might even be deemed expensive for a medium-large shop (since they don't list pricing details). However, for an outfit as large as CloudFlare, I find it hard pressed to believe they couldn't afford Basic Support considering that one of their engineers on this thread stated that DNS is a critical part of CloudFlare's core service offering.
You don't ask for a support contract for a specific bug, but for a general class of support and current + future bugs. As part of the negotiation, your boss and organization can also leverage "lighthouse" status to influence PowerDNS to fix even minor bugs quickly as part of a negotiated Service Level Agreement ("SLA").
EDIT: To give CloudFlare the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that PowerDNS didn't make their support options clear to users before, and only updated their support pages after this post-mortem.
Also, carrier grade support does indeed sound expensive for a small shop. Might even be deemed expensive for a medium-large shop (since they don't list pricing details). However, for an outfit as large as CloudFlare, I find it hard pressed to believe they couldn't afford Basic Support considering that one of their engineers on this thread stated that DNS is a critical part of CloudFlare's core service offering.
You don't ask for a support contract for a specific bug, but for a general class of support and current + future bugs. As part of the negotiation, your boss and organization can also leverage "lighthouse" status to influence PowerDNS to fix even minor bugs quickly as part of a negotiated Service Level Agreement ("SLA").
EDIT: To give CloudFlare the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that PowerDNS didn't make their support options clear to users before, and only updated their support pages after this post-mortem.
[1] https://www.powerdns.com/enhancements.html