Generally, it's a good idea to keep discussion in one place. If developers aren't evaluating the patch at the speed you prefer, bump the Mantis ticket a few times. Only after repeated bumping should you post in the forum. 
And what does stuff_string() have to do with engine wash? There should really be only one issue per ticket. You have developer permissions on Mantis now; you can open a new Mantis ticket and start discussion about stuff_string() there. 
Okay okay consider it done, I'll create a new ticket for the extra error checking and move the diff there
As for why is it linked to engine wash? Well it's because while I was adding the error check for the engine wash I noticed there were other similar cases where stuff_string() was being used to pull a string value out of a table, and it needed to be meaningful (it usually had to correspond to a name in some other table) but no error checking was being done on them. So I decided to go through and fix as many as I could find, rather than wait for FUBAR To bug them all individually
But you're right, that belongs in a different bug report.
