This appears to have been fixed now. KI apparently changed the White Buffaloons to Striped Bumbaloons. We still need 8 meat, but every fight I did last night dropped the meat. This still took at least an hour, even with egg-shen and others getting 2-4 attacks (normal hit, relentless, first strike, blade storm etc) as a level 27 privateer, but at least I felt like I was making progress.
Thank you KingsIsle for updating this quest to take some of the frustration out. I am hoping you will decide to change other "did not collect, please try again" type quests with a set number of combats for the number of items needed.
I did the quest and it went justfine for me. I got one white buffaloon each battle and sometimes it did not collect, but I got this quest done in about 30 minutes. It's possible to complete, but I think KI should at least make it a 100% drop rate.