NW_Kohaku has pertinent and well-thought suggestions, but it looks like he expects Toady owes him attention for those threads. Toady's various remarks he reads the Suggestions boards isn't enough for him.
That's how I read it, too. I can't fault people for wanting to be involved in development, but when you ask for direct, thoughtful feedback on your ideas, you're putting a serious drain on a developer who already spends huge amounts of time interacting with this community. In general, lack of time is a much bigger problem for DF than lack of good ideas, and people should probably keep that in mind when seeking developer interaction.
I don't expect much feedback, no more than I expect anyone else to get, at least, and generally try to use the channels I use in limited quantities to get what I can get. I ask questions mostly to get a feel for what he is trying to do, and questions for what he is willing or unwilling to put into his game so that I can try to make a suggestion that supports, rather than contradicts his vision, and I do keep those things in mind and limit myself, however verbose I may be, otherwise.
And, for that matter, I try to rely upon old scraps of information, or what Toady has said in the past (although he obviously will change his mind after a few years of working), which is mostly what my relationship with DF Talk has been - trying to come up with search terms in them to find the useful fragments of information on a given topic. FotF or other forum responses or ThreeToe stories are much denser sources of information than DF Talk is. What makes it annoying is that I can't just NOT search those sources, either.
So yes, I like the ways Toady communicates, but I'd really prefer he focus more on the forms of communication that are easier to search for, whether they are
my questions or not. Forcing answers to questions about suggestions off of the forums, and into emails is therefore depriving the rest of the community of those answers. It answers one person's question, but odds are with suggestions, many people are going to come up with the same questions. It's much simpler when we have a statement from Toady that we can search for and point to that says "yes, he's talked about exploding barrels, but you're almost certainly not going to see guns in vanilla".
For that, DF Talk is not as useful as a forum post, and people might never know an email was answered at all.
EDIT:
The questions I ask in the FotF thread, and their responses, are there for everyone to see. Oftentimes, people will comment on and express interest in those questions I asked. I also read every question answered, since I can generally find at least one question that provokes an interesting response.
Thvaz may want to insinuate some selfish motive to this, since he's expressed contempt for the people who asked questions in the FotF thread before, and generally tried to bully people out of the thread, but it is no such thing. I push back against that drive to throw people out of the thread whether it was against my questions, or against the questions of others.