MIss Schedule… is there a better solution?

I know this one is kicking around both here and on the other “troubleshooting” section, but this is something that is really bugging me.

Up until 3.8 or so, WordPress was pretty dependable when it came to launching scheduled posts. I don’t want to say it was too easy, but the concept and function of the scheduled posts is simple and something that should just work.

It no longer works reliably enough to count on. For a commercial site which may be releasing information on a sale, promotion, or limited time offer, having a post fail to come up at the right time is a real issue. Writing blog posts ahead of time for anyone and then not having them appear is a real pain. Basically, it means that the admin is pretty much forced to check every blog, every day, to make sure that every post got added properly.

The solution given is hammer to get a fly deal, running a cron job every few minutes to check is sort of over the top, and on a single server that has dozens of blogs on it, a remarkable waste of system resources.

Why is this broken? This is something core to wordpress, a basic concept. Who screwed up the code? This is the simple stuff. Don’t worry about neat-o json moving menu trickery, worry about the basics.

What’s up with this, and will it get fixed soon (and the fix back ported to 3.8.3, which seems to be where some will have to stay for a while)?