You’re ain’t wrong. Reminds me of an experience from the early days of mainstream internet.
There’s this forum dedicated to naval combat simulators called SubSim. It’s a ghost town nowadays – mostly just a general topic forum with a half dozen people yelling about politics. Nobody makes submarine simulators anymore. But back in the day it was a bustling community that was about as active as these forums.
Janes 688(i), a submarine simulation, was released in 1997. Despite its potential, it had a lot of broken features. But back then there was no line to the devs. So in the spirit of not giving up, a bunch of us convinced the owner to start a “Fix my 688(i) petition”. Really, it was just a list of broken features, a polite letter asking for a downloadable patch – the cutting edge of late 90’s gaming technology – and a long list of names. And there it sat until late 1998 when a dev from Janes Combat Simulations happened to come across us and posted on the forums.
Man, we were wide-eyed and falling all over ourselves. This was a dev. And he was talking to us. Wild, right? I often think about that when I see demands and expectations about developer contact today. We were floored that someone from the dev team knew we existed.