It’s not entirely true.
The developer working on Virtual Texturing is active in this topic: https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/feedback-for-epic/1618618-virtual-texturing-feedback?p=1687552#post1687552
Just recently question about glTF importer received quick reply: https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/feedback-for-epic/1687601-add-collision-and-socket-support-to-gltf-importer
Audio engineers are active in Audio thread, i.e.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/audio/116874-new-audio-engine-early-access-quick-start-guide?p=1686785#post1686785
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/audio/1683494-audio-synesthesia?p=1686777#post1686777
Let’s be honest, I’d be eager to reply to most of the threads here if I’d be Epic’s developer.
- Besides they regular engine work, they obligated to answer on UDN which is a bit of work. I guess it’s already a time-consuming obligation.
- It’s not like on UDN also that engineer would usually say “yes, I understand your issue, we gonna fix it!”. Nope, often you get dismissed or you hear “I understand the issue, we have no plans to do something with it, but please make a pull request”
- Only a handful of issues here can be instantly addressed. There’s no point in engineer coming and saying “yeah, I know this thing is terrible, I’d like to fix it, but I’ve no idea who and when could fix it”. Especially that “Feedback for Epic” includes feedback on everything in the engine and nobody in Epic know every part of engine, so many engineers people would have to browse everything here? Perhaps they would find “technical community managers” which you push valuable feedback to the proper engineering team? But how you’d find such specific people?
- There’s no “premium support” on forums, they sometimes come here if they have time.