The original bug Nick reported is fixed and I haven't heard any (other) reports of a regression besides you and Jacob. Contacting support is my recommendation because I'm just a developer who spends (too much) time on the forums - I'm not at all getting a representative sample, and maybe in support they're dealing with this every week. I doubt it, and I'd assume that if they are experiencing a lot of issues with this they'd have raised another internal bug ticket, but 
The point is data collection in the centralized location that deals with customer reported issues.
You can't really debug an issue with the gateway's internal state from the designer, because they're entirely separate processes.
The most likely explanation, to my mind, is a different bug, distinct from what Nick originally reported, that you and Jacob have managed to get into.
Do you happen to be using import statements in your Python code to bring in project library code? That's fundamentally flawed in 8.1 and all prior versions (fixed in 8.3, though still not recommended):