Your choosing to be here, however infrequently you may have the time to actually post, is definitely appreciated @DanielW .
I want to give my thoughts on bug reporting, from the perspective of a programmer.
With a couple of exceptions for urgent cases (the last one I considered ‘urgent’ related to an issue with core UBT functionality; it was ignored and persists 2 full engine versions later), I essentially gave up reporting bugs to Epic a long time ago. As ridiculous as it sounds, I often still write down some details that I keep locally for my own reference, but don’t submit a report because it’s an unjustifiable waste of time.
The fundamental problem is that invariably reports have to get through a support technician before an engineer will see them. I understand completely why this filtering is needed. As a programmer though, when I find what I think is a bug, I dig into the engine code to see what’s happening. As such, my reports generally had detailed information about what happened, why, and generally linked to specific offending lines of engine code on Github. These reports would be dealt with by support techs without any programming knowledge, often misunderstanding the technical details, asking for full repro projects, etc. This is no disrespect to those people, who of course were doing their best to help, but the bottom line is the time investment required to get a report accepted was absurd.
The alternative is Github PRs, but in most cases, I know enough to pinpoint the bug, but not enough to be confident of the best way to fix it. I don’t want to abuse the PR system; anyway, lately even PRs are suffering from the same problem, building up without response.
I think an ideal system would be to have some automated filtering of reports, so that technical reports with references to specific lines of engine code could go through more directly to the relevant Epic engineers. I realize this is squarely in the “we won’t get to it anytime soon” category, of course. I just wanted to point it out though; I really think Epic are missing out on a lot of potential help from their community due to lack of good feedback infrastructure.
As to Victor’s general point, I agree the Feedback forum is definitely not what it used to be. There has without doubt been a steady decline in staff involvement ever since the UE4 subscription model was scrapped, though I suspect it’s more down to the increased number of engine users and requests than any intentional change in policy.