Revenant (3/4/2013)
Gary Varga (3/4/2013)
. . . As a community we want better products and know that our collective opinions and knowledge count.Microsoft has people who "own this line of communication." They need from time to time someone to let them know that their performance is under scrutiny.
Please tell them that the cost of filling in all the fields required in a thorough manner is overwhelmingly too high to be worthwhile based on the expected response, which is for nothing to be done - this is overwhelmingly the most common response. The second most expected response is a note in the Connect article of "Will be fixed in next version", followed by it still being an issue in the next version. This is like the first response, except users have to wait quite awhile to see that.
It takes hours to do a thorough study of an issue, write up good explanations and precise instructions for how to repeat the results, as well as exploring for workarounds and writing up any found. For very interesting or intermittent issues, it takes much longer.
If it takes 4 hours to do that, and we expect less than 5% of Connect items to actually have something done about them, then we expect to spend in excess of 80 hours of effort per item actually addressed... with no idea which one of the items submitted will be addressed, if any.
Sorry; in all but the most critical cases, it's simply not worth the time.