I'm pretty sure the way it works is that S-E outsource the forums to the community management team. Our reps seem to be in the US, and occasionally they will escalate things up to the people in power and we either get a GM post about an individual case or an official response saying that our comments have been noted with some feedback if there's anything they're allowed to say in response.

You have to remember that a lot of issues like the housing mafia simply don't exist on Japanese servers as problems, so while it seems as though everyone on some servers is suffering it's actually a minority overall and player issues like that should probably be a lower priority than crippling game issues. Hopefully the new apartments will make this kind of behaviour less rewarding because it sounds ridiculously jerkish. It's every bit as difficult for someone from a relatively troll-free society to anticipate how nasty some players will be to one another as it is for people used to trolls to imagine how the culture on a Japanese server works. I remember when Diadem Hard was revealed and people on the English forums started speculating about FCs selling slots to people without workshops out of greed; I never even imagined that possibility in spite of my years playing games.

I wouldn't really want the actual devs to try wading through the forums to find the useful information as it would probably depress them (and they should take some time away from the game when they're not working on it for their own sakes). There are a lot of awful ideas amongst the important ones. I think this system works ok so long as people keep their campaigns civilised, informative and all in the same thread so the community team can easily spot the major problems affecting large numbers of people without investing hours into putting all of the puzzle pieces together.