Exactly who is fighting Microsoft here?

And please read again - SDHelper does already use this list as well. And yes, it prefetches the list instead of loading it each time.

Immunization is another layer of protection. Hosts, Immunization, SDHelper are three layers of the same. There is malware attacking each layer, but rarely all, so we prefer multiple layers. You suggested using SDHelper instead - well, that can be easily attacked - due to another bug in Internet Explorer actually that allows BHOs to attack/influence other BHOs much too easily (a malware plugin could very easily prevent other security plugins from seeing which pages are accessed for example - even some legit buggy plugins misbehave that way).

As for what Microsoft is changing or not changing - this is not about something they would have to change for us - it's an implementation failure independent of us. And Microsoft does not even fix issues that every single Windows user has - just take a look at my blog about the buffer overflow which I reported about IE, but which actually goes down deep into the kernel.

Btw: issue 377.