Comment Thanks for clarifying -- I should have researched. (Score 3, Informative) 110
I should have done that research before posting -- thank you for clarifying the situation.
There is still a bug here, in that (according to the linked bug ticket) even if one *requests* a key using a longer ID, from a keyserver that can handle the request, GPG transforms it to the short ID and then returns you all the keys that match. That seems like non-optimal behavior, given that the user asked carefully, and the server could have answered, if only GPG would transmit the true request.
However, that's a slightly different problem from what I originally posted, so I'm glad you replied.