Mountain Lion, Time Machine recover not working

My MacBook Pro was behaving funny, getting stuck on the spinning beach ball and not starting up properly. I have AppleCare for got in touch and they suggested I erase my disk and reinstall Mountain Lion. Having been backing up with Time Machine I did just that and, lo and behold, my Time Machine backup was not recognised. After doing a bit of searching, I found threads related to the issue here

UPDATED: Serious Time Machine bug on Mountain Lion

I think this is what's happened with me. Now, the good news is that most of my stuff seems to be okay, and is there to copy across. What's deeply frustrating is that I will have to download and install all the software and apps that I use, and all my passwords, favourites, user keys etc will be lost and I'll need to try and find them (I'm particularly unsure where the case for my copy of Office is, with the serial numbers).

My questions are:

1. Is there anything I can do to recover the above info? I know the answer is no, but just want to check!

2. Is there any way of making a complaint to Apple about what seems to have been a known issue, but nothing was done about? Appreciate I seem to be a bit behind the times, given that thread finished last year.

I will not be using Time Machine in future to back anything up!