Ok now I see: I was talking about “Repeat Bars (barlines)”, while you were actually talking about “bar repeats” 
Ok maybe we are playing with words.
So please tell me how you fix this.
Because the answer is in what you’ve written:
I agree, but unfortunately the bar repeat sign in the score editor is just a graphic symbol.
Which means the bar containing the bar repeat sign is (or considered as) actually really empty, at least MIDI speaking!
You see where I’m going here.
As the score editor is highly MIDI data oriented (as opposed to only graphic), it needs to some extent that all MIDI data to be present.
So what you have to do (probably this was your “fix”) is to actually duplicate the notes from the previous bar and then apply the bar repeat sign (and vice versa).
This is not a “workaround” in my opinion. This is how the score editor is designed: a “musicians view of MIDI data” as the developer himself describes his program.
That said, I think It would be a valid feature request: the bar repeat could be an active function. It could duplicate the notes from the previous bar. And in addition, in case you have 102 bars (
) it could have a number indicating the number of repeated bars, as for multi-rests.