Honestly, it's not so much a "bug" as two concurrent stories involving the same characters. You can't start one and have the characters in two places at once (of course, you CAN; and often games fix this issue by doing exactly this but not always). If you play MMO's you'll be familiar with the concept of a quest being off limits until you complete some other quest that changes the phase of the zone you're in. If your quest is to establish the town that contains all the characters needed to complete a different quest then you just have to complete that portion first. Assuming completing the atonement quest reliably fixes the issue, I wouldn't be too hard on the devs. I'm having the glitch right now on my first play through, but I think the information give in 2018 is sufficient as long as people can google it. I'll report back and let you know if it does indeed fix my glitched run.

