At 10.2.1 Esri include two Python modules XLRD and XLWT which provide an API to read and write Excel spreadsheets, so it is unlikely that the ExcelToTable will be fixed because we can do it ourselves.
What should have happened is that the developer used these tools to read the structure and metadata in the Excel file and present a dialog to choose the sheets, named ranges and also a fieldmapping to alter the terrible defaults of 255 characters and floating point numbers for everything.
