I do mostly agree, but I think the thing about being afraid of ‘criticism’ is more of a cultural thing than the devs themselves.

That is to say, when it comes to the community, things like criticisms can somehow end up jumping straight from 0 to extreme (i.e sending death threats, abusive messages and posts , etc). From what I’ve heard it can actually be really bad in the JP community too. I think, rather than being afraid of ‘genuine feedback’, it’s that kind of feedback that they’re actually worried about; the destructive kind that just hurts people instead of trying to address an issue.

I mentioned in another thread too but it’s also worth considering the (supposed) language barrier. A lot of the time, it’s not so much that they don’t want to directly address NA/EU communities, it’s that they have difficulty finding translators who are familiar enough with the game to understand how to properly translate specific game terms, abbreviations etc. Now, I have no idea whether any of it is actually true lol, but I do know they’ve cited the language barriers in the past as being one of the reasons why they rarely engage with the NA/EU community