Continuously placing gravity affected blocks by pointing the cursor at a wall behind can not be done.

This has been an issue for a while. I have a machine which turns concrete powder into concrete, it has a hopper section that we fill up with powder from above. When I built the machine we used to be able to fill the machine quickly by pointing the cursor at the back wall of the hopper and continously holding the place button then strafe left and right till a full stack of powder had been placed. But for a long time now (since the face plant bug was fixed) we cannot do continuous placement. we have to spam the place item button while strafing left and right.