> Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone
That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions.
https://github.com/actions/checkout#note
No. Products don't magically get good because people conjured up features from thin air or just copied a competitor. It is very much a two-way street, especially when the product acts as a platform that tries to support heterogeneous use cases.
It is not the users job. Literally. If you want that kind of feedback from users, then identify your power users and offer them contracts and money.