The absurd thing is that one simple, proposed patch (#20) is just a few lines of actual code - far less than all the "blah blah blah" attached to the bug report.
It fixes the problem now but does nothing to prevent the same problem showing up again in another script. Good maintainers are careful about putting some band-aid over a problem instead of fixing it. And from what he said it seems he rather plans fixing it in Upstart instead of having to patch scripts every-time. That does not sound absurd to me.