I recently noticed a performance problem 
...
What worries me is that such a regression
had been sitting there for over a year

There are 215 open runtime performance tickets (out of a total of 1655 open tickets, that makes 13%).

Compared to say new typesystem features, they don't get much attention. Only a few were fixed this year, most of them by Joachim Breitner (the new performance tsar?). He also created https://perf.haskell.org/ghc.

In case you want to help out, start here: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Newcomers.