I think the forums suck also. As for suggestions and such TA is coming up on its 6th anniversary (in a few days seems like) and I think it is safe to say that the game is in a maintenance only place not a new development place.
That is totally unofficial (as I am totally unofficial) but my humble opinion. I wish TA were generating enough funding to spawn some new things which is what you'd hope for out of a successful FTP modeled game but my guess is that it does not, that it spawns enough to keep them keeping things up and running, fixing problems along the way but not enough to generate a bunch of new coding costs.