Anyone who can't craft a simple regexp to fix the problems you describe has no business taking money from a publisher to create ebooks in the first place. I'd say that in reality A epubcheck has done us all a favour by exposing his incompetence and getting him fired
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No-one is saying that epubcheck is enough on its own. If you only have a limited amount of time, then sure, there are other ways of testing that should take precedence. But I have to take you back to my first reply to this thread - epubcheck is about future-proofing. What happens in 5 years' time when some xhtml standards committee decides that the 'name' attribute now specifies the number of sparkly lights to surround a character? Publishers need to take the long-view. They need to minimise the chance that they'll have to spend a ton of money in the future getting someone to correct a ton of errors that shouldn't have been made in the first place.