The most effective way to get Adobe's attention is to provide "before" and "after" versions of a corrupted raw file and a sequence of steps in LR that cause the corruption on more than one configuration. Adobe would jump on that and fix the problem very quickly. Can you not do that? You said you always make a backup copy before importing into LR.
Regarding "so many users suddenly having issues", can you post concrete evidence (i.e. URLs) that back up that claim? How many is "so many"?