just some random ideas…
I think the situation can be improved if there were some people moderating the forums. ( volunteers ) You know, a more open community that drives by itself.
Volunteers, stick threads, remove spam, move, organize, close threads and point people to the right locations ( educating users ).
Also, I think we can be a little more organized if we have more subforums. Example “sublime builds”, “sublime bugs”," sublime features"," sublime support", “packages development”, “theme development”, “packages releases”, “sublime API”, “sublime docs”
In a similar way a real bug tracker will help a lot. Moderated by volunteers too, allowing to organize, close, request information, confirming, mark as dup, some netiquette allowing people to contribute in an organized way instead of having the stupid +1 post or a useless comment as in forum threads.
Also, this will allow to see status of bug/features request. For example “confirmed” target release “sublime 4”, this is important because people have an answer and they will not ask again, they may vote the bug/feature and or contribute with some idea. IF they do’t have nothing productive to say the better shutup.
I think This will allow to remove some pressure… and keep you focused on things you consider are important. If you are not happy, creating and improving this very nice piece of software… we as a community are doing it very wrong.
I like the ideas of above post such pushing devs release to people that already paid for the software.