The forums have a rather small userbase and you can more or less keep track of the people who actively post a lot. Their opinions have been entrenched since the beginning (yourself, sludge khalid, Maximuuus, tuco, KillerRabit, etc) and have not shifted much over the course of time. There were some contrarians who also posted a lot but they have disappeared (firesnake, surfaces_R, etc). They also had their own list of issues, but they disagreed with the first group on quite a few topics and there was some back and forth discussion about it without going into mud slinging. I would strongly bet on the shift of discourse being the result of the disappearance of the latter group leading to the creation of an echo chamber here, similar to how reddit is the echo chamber to go to when you want to discuss Helsin's body.
Of course I am not going to argue with the fact that the forums always only represent a very small percentage of the game's community. And I would also agree with the fact that whenever people do join the forums, it is usually because they have a complaint or issue of some kind. People joining the forums on praise alone is rare, very rare indeed.
However, I would ask you to not mistake the talkative ones for the only active ones. :] I have been here since autumn of last year, and while I more often than not am way too inexperienced and clueless to actually participate in the conversation (unless I actually just leave some encouragement or a newbie point of view) - I have been reading these forums almost daily ever since, although I do not always have something to post myself. I cannot imagine I am the only one lurking around here with the main objective being just reading, learning and generally just keeping an eye on the active discussions.
EDIT: by the way, while I think any suggestion / complaint / discussion is worth respecting as we all have different priorities when playing the game, your bingo card is on point. 11/10 :'D
