Round the U-Bend: The Fix-It-Quick Culture

Since Claire & I moved into our apartment in February there is one task which I have constantly failed at trying to achieve:
Getting rid of the smell form the sink, which sends the occasional stagnant waft around the open plan room. It's like the Ambi-Pur plug in freshener from hell.
I've tried various things, but to no avail.
The question is, has my latest attempt fixed the problem for good?
Yes, armed with not much more than a container to catch the excess water, some plughole smell remover and a toothbrush I decided to take the piping underneath the sink to bits and look inside.

First off: the u-bend - what a stink!
Then slowly I took bits off of other bits and saw more and more dark brown/grey ikky, smelly, mess.
I think I may have now located the problem, but at the moment the smell in the open plan kitchen/lounge/dining room is worse than it was before. So having opened windows and sprayed a good load of Oust, it's just time to wait to determine whether our life had been smelled out by possibly years of rotting 'stuff'.

I wonder, now, why I didn't think to go straight to cleaning out the pipes in the first place rather than many futile attempts to just make the smell go away using chemicals.
Maybe it's because I'm so caught up in an instant-fix world that my brain doesn't always allow me to think with proper reason.

Maybe this is the same reason so many friendships, marriages, families, etc. break down - because the instant fix of putting on brave faces, happy smiles and saying, 'I'm fine, thanks!' whilst pushing the crap so far down that it becomes hidden in a dark place and forgotten means that the intricate depths of truth are never really confronted; The things which need taking apart bit by bit and examining, before carefully working together to get rid of the stale remnants of past or recent things which will never be dealt with unless we risk facing a worse smell for a short time.