A while back, I was in a discussion (no devs included, it was still in the "working out the proposal" stage) about the addition of community liaison staff. The devs are, on a technical level, reasonably capable. But there's not enough of you to keep track of what the players are trying to do everywhere while also keeping your own intended story moving. This is why development in entire regions seems to stagnate somewhat regularly. The idea, thus, was taking on additional people as a point of community contact to gather suggestions and requests and bring them to the devs if they were properly workable.
The benefit of this approach is that it makes the devs look more open to community input and less controlling. The bureaucratic approach you've implemented here does the opposite. In fact, the below-quoted line from Xalrok reads to me like an admission that y'all don't want any player input and just feel like you've been forced to accept it. I'll entertain the possibility that he simply chose his words poorly in an attempt to keep a professional tone.
Quote:While the intent of Discovery Freelance RP 24/7 was never the canonization of player roleplay, we acknowledge and accept the fact that players wish to have an impact on the game world. We do not wholly believe that a degree of player influence is incompatible with Discovery's design ethos.
Even without that reading, even without that quote, the bureaucratic angle is still a persistent problem. Discovery has historically been very big on bureaucracy and that's not attractive to new players, or to an aging playerbase that has other things to do in their lives.
