Re: The devs that chat with us and the devs who don’t.

I think we need to account that for liability, individual skillset, and resource allocation reasons, they probably don't want every dev interacting with the public on these kinds of forums.

Community interaction almost certainly takes training.  Community managers need to know exactly what they can/can't say and write very precisely.  Even when the wording of their statements is 99% clear, the community will often still run with an incorrect and uncharitable interpretation (see: dozens of people falsely repeating that we wouldn't get a patch from 1.05 until mid-August).  So it takes a level of awareness and a bit of "lawyer brain" to understand exactly what you are promising and acknowledging to the community.

Then, do we really want more devs spending less time on the technical side of development?  Having a handful of community liaisons who can summarize community feedback and roll it up to the decision makers is going to lead to more efficient operation.  Yes, I would absolutely love having a directly line to the devs, telling them exactly what irks me, and having one sympathize with me and prioritize my feedback.  But that would lead to anarchy.  I can't pretend to know how Codemasters is structured internally, but when they manage an annual release in addition to their other franchises, it's essential to have a pipeline to take issues from user reports, to backlog, to WIP, to resolved, to QA, to approved, to release.

tl;dr Devs need a community manager just like NASA needs a CAPCOM.