I am willing to wait more than 2 weeks for this fix, chances are there will be side effects to fixing this. Aside from play-balance issues, the attack stat may be used in computations other than straight combat. It has been noted that the AI tries to "match up" units when the battle lines come together, I would assume it is comparing attack/defense stats as part of this. Which attack stat is it using? Maybe this explains some of the odd decisions being made by the AI. It's unlikely, but maybe this is one factor leading to the town square/under fire bug. "They're shooting at us, let's charge them!", "No way, look at those attack values!"

It does surprise me that CA or the QA would not notice this. I would assume CA can log battles and look at the combat results on a per-attack basis. Granted, this would be boring work to parse through those logs, but still...

Also, does this bug exist in the unpatched version? Maybe this was introduced in the first patch.