There are lots of choices. You can learn how to develop a patch yourself or organize people to do it. You can pay someone to develop a patch for you. You can fork the product yourself or organize people to do it. You can pay someone to fork the product for you. You can switch to another product. Or you can live with it. Those are the only choices.
Using a piece of free software doesn't give any user the right to a developer's time or bandwidth. The bug tracking software is there to assist the developers in cataloging and responding to bugs. It isn't a public forum or discussion. Some projects have such forums. Some do not.
Developers have different priorities than users. Maybe there isn't enough developer interest to fix a bug or add a new feature. Maybe developers are busy fixing other more important issues. Maybe developers are unpaid and busy with their lives. Just because it matters to a user, or even a lot of users, doesn't mean that it does, or should, matter to developers.
Many developers of free software get sick of dealing with users when there aren't clear protocols and respect involved. Pidgin's developers famously stopped paying any attention to their public forums for a while due issues like that a while back. Interestingly, it's been shown many times that free software users (that's free with a lowercase f as in no cost) are the most demanding and entitled users. They're more trouble to support on average than paying customers. Paying customers are more likely to either suck it up and deal with an issue or politely ask for a bug fix. The thinking is that they value the software (and, thus, the developer) more having paid for it. Open source users that value the concept of open source are a bit different. But many users of open source software don't care about that aspect of it... just the no cost aspect. So, open source developers have to deal with those free users as well.
Just look at that bugzilla bug:
"Seriously, this bug was reported in 2001! What a joke, will this ever be resolved? Is there any point to bugzilla at all?"
"WTF!? FF3 shouldn't be released until this is fixed, how hard can this be?"
"I am amazed that this bug has been allowed to hang around since 2001! I'm not going to hold my breath for a fix anytime soon..."
"Serously? Not enough time? You've had what, almost a decade? Please."
"Looks like the programmers behind Firefox are lazy, possibly bad coders, and don't care about the customer base. Fantastic. This is great reason of motivation to try other browsers such as Opera or Chrome, although I don't use either currently."
And then lots of me toos, plenty of reddit spam, circular discussion from non-developers, conversations about browser replacing operating systems, ALL CAPS YELLING ABOUT HOW CRITICAL SOMETHING IS, etc
Burnout amongst free software developers in the face of entitled users who feel like they are owed what they want (and demand it, often with little respect for the developer) is a very real thing in open source and free (lowercase f) software. It doesn't get talked about enough, which is a shame. I've lost developers over it more than once. And nearly quit projects because of it.
What do we do about bugs that sit there for a very long time? They're clearly not good for the developers or the community at large.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6712687