Any dev worth their salt wants to hear all of the opinions. You can get really good ideas even reading the most vitriolic crap. Source 25+ years in I.T., 20 doing development and architecture. If reading mean things makes you sad don't make things that humans interface with, they're all little animals and the nice ones will turn vicious as fast as anyone when it doesn't go their way.
You want to hear opinions that matters to your particular context - qualified and quantified, the rest can be lumped together (and that's not exactly hearing all of them) - you also have a time frame for it too. Otherwise your feedback would never end nor would your meetings nor your contract which might be good in some cases, but you would also never get a product out.
You can also get really good ideas without going through that shit and you can always hire someone else or have a machine parse through it without ever having to respond to it directly either. How many times does an AT&T engineer actually bother responding to a customer? You either get an automated message or you get a low level rep - not a dev. You would be lucky (or unlucky) to have a dev directly interact with you, otherwise the best you can hope for is that your complaint makes its way through their intake and ends up as a JIRA ticket. That's pretty much the experience of most people and somehow I don't think you're asking for an automated reply. Also, go ahead and look at the github issues opened on say Sendgrid and tell me how many of those complaints say "You guys are so fucking stupid you have no idea what you're doing". Pretty much none.
You're also conflating good development to having to directly read and respond to things; you have CM for that and barring that it isn't a given that you need to write a reply. Most of the time it isn't your job as you're better off coding rather than get involved in arguing with the endless wave.
Most development companies are not what you describe - I've jumped around a few Y Combinator start ups and I do currently work at a Fortune 500 company as a lead developer.
The point is simple: Its possible, its relatively easy. Pretty low odds that I could walk into their offices for a week and walk out saying "Yep. Its impossible to meet their goals and have any kind of interaction with the community. Whoa!"
And the point is it's also simple to read and move on. What isn't simple is having to craft a reply and have it vetted by PR, legal, and what other forces are at play.
I mean what's more simple? Reading and responding or reading?
At the end of the day you aren't entitled to a response. You're entitled to a product that is described on the store page but that's about it.
The fact is they are doing exactly what they want to be doing, and it doesn't involve the community. It wouldn't be an issue if they had made their process and goals clear.
Depends on your definition of involving the community considering that the only way to get the data that they have is for the community to play it and as others have alluded they are taking feedback, but they aren't required to respond directly either. Also, the EA period isn't over so there's plenty of time for them to open up (or not). At the end of the day, they don't need to make their processes or goals clear beyond setting basic expectations and you may have overreached with yours. Would it be better if they did? Maybe. But looking at how DOS2 went and how it sold, I don't think there is a compelling argument that they should change their process viewing it externally.
And here's the funny thing...
The forums would be empty except for a hopeful few and the rest would play the game, beat it, wait for the next patch, and probably play it again.Stop if they aren't having fun anymore. Quiet, simple, we are in accord
This is pretty much what is happening now. All this outrage is pretty much a minority much like the 5e purists.
Also, if you are what you say you are, you earn enough money to do both. In a matter of fact, why not play BG3 while at a brothel.
