100% of programs have bugs. We can't expect to hold the bleeding edge to the same rigor as, say, a flight computer. It's sometimes literally the first implementation of an algorithm or procedure.
The comments here using words like "disease" and such are not wrong, just tilting at the wrong windmill. The problem, I think, is not the initial bugs, but the lack of maintenance and improvement over time. You should be able to contribute to these projects, and receive credit akin to publishing a new result. Authors and contributors (and bug-fixers) should receive more credit for the subsequent results derived from their software. This aligns incentives more properly: The researchers struggling to gain insight using tools can trust the tools, and they are incentivized to make their new tools useful to the community, rather than publish-and-forget.
The comments here using words like "disease" and such are not wrong, just tilting at the wrong windmill. The problem, I think, is not the initial bugs, but the lack of maintenance and improvement over time. You should be able to contribute to these projects, and receive credit akin to publishing a new result. Authors and contributors (and bug-fixers) should receive more credit for the subsequent results derived from their software. This aligns incentives more properly: The researchers struggling to gain insight using tools can trust the tools, and they are incentivized to make their new tools useful to the community, rather than publish-and-forget.