You can't sell broken armor. Considering this was fixed before the rollback, I am assuming it breaking again wasn't intentional.
I believe it helped pull off a money glitch that basically broke the economy and resulted in the rollback.
They just did a Rollback so the Plugin got reset to it's old Version where this was still broken. Just my silly guess.
There was a rollback of this, yes. We need to basically redo how it works to reduce lag, so will look into that in the near future.