Does anyone "in the industry" know just how difficult a problem like this is to solve? Is this a specification level bug where the rendering engine was architecturally built wrong?

I've only done student-level cg programming, but it seems that any fix to the on-screen projection math might also create difficulties with other gfx features that rely on the 4:3 aspect assumption. It's not like in the old-days of quake where you could hit the '~' with /fov 110 and get improved results -- there are tons of bleeding-edge gfx effects and filters. Is it possible that the poor widescreen support is a workaround for rendering-bugs to do with 16:9 projection?

I really hope not, I was looking forward to this title being the quintessential example for video game design. I'm holding out that it'll get there.