Heh, thanks. I believe that my posts get read; often, they get comments. The devs are loathe to make anything resembling a commitment, because someone (sometimes me) will bring it up forever and forever, with a nasty "BUT YOU SAID THIS", and who among us likes to have that done?
The only thing we can do is point out the issues we see, which doesn't usually tell them as much about the game as it does about our perceptions of the game - perhaps even more important, when we don't know of any devs playing near-end-game Shaman toons.
We can look at our situation at any given time, at our complaints, and at what did or didn't happen with subsequent changes. While we have (and likely never will have) any hard evidence that our situation was seriously listened to, we can just see the results and draw conclusions.
For example, take the first top ten list I compiled, at
http://samanna.net/sham.issues/10.sep05.shtml and look at my comments after the fact. No matter the reason for a change, or our approval of the change, four of those issues had changes that affected them: Nectar of Pain, Ghost of Renewal, Idol of Malo(s), and Talisman of Celerity.
We are identifying and quantifying the issues we perceive in game. Some of them are being addressed. As for the others, perhaps they are considered too unbalancing, or too hard to fix, or not worth the effort, or intentional, or some other reason... or perhaps they are just further down the list, or waiting for some other change to happen before reevaluation.
I'm happy to be doing this for our community, but really, I don't think I'm doing much different in this role from my predecessors, Grimbear and Banditman. Many of the changes we've seen in the past year were probably grown from seeds they planted.