I get that it is basically an impossible problem to triage incoming issues on such large and widely used software, but my impression of the popular "community" approach is that it is useless and designed to provide an outlet for complaints rather than to identify issues.
On the Photoshop team we have dedicated staff to monitor, triage, and respond to these issues. You’re right in that we cannot address _everything_ that comes in from these boards- the sheer volume is too much. Nevertheless we do use it to identify top customer issues and our dev schedule prioritizations are influenced by them.
To wit: I’m known on the team for sussing out information from corrupted PSDs, and get called on about once a quarter to look into a bad file that’s come in. That wouldn’t happen as frequently without the community site.
