The moment that made me reconsider FFXIV

[Shougun]

They sent out questionnaires to players.

I love those lol. Well at least for companies that are interesting to me (SE would count) or have done something for me. Some companies actually really value those, depending on how you treat the CS and respond to the non-anonymous ones sometimes (it seems) you'll be treated well. Like Comcast seems to actually want to keep me lol "hey I noticed you increased my bill, can we not do that? Yes sir, it's back to the same rate it has been for the last 6 years, don't forget to call in a few months to extend your free hd cable box for the remainder of the contract have a good day!". Nielsen (iirc the name right) sends me a survey like once a month with ~$5-10 in them and when I fill them out (usually one page) they send $10-20 or a bigger survey with a larger pre-pay and fill out reward lol.

SE would have to put a word limit though; otherwise, some of us might be tempted to respond to them in the depth of short stories XD.

As for @OP, there is nothing wrong with taking a break if it's draining you. I don't think Yoshi-P is out of touch per say, because there are hundreds of thousands to touch (lol), so he's bound to disappoint someone based on the sheer number of people. There are too many people to always make everyone happy, just has to try his best to make as many as possible pleased and attentive to many diverse needs.. which I can imagine is really hard. I would like to see some more interaction, but I get that takes away from their dev time and stresses people out (we all can be a bit awful, self included haha).

Although I do think they read feedback and respond from personal experience (or happenstance depending on how you look at it), so I think just being polite yet constructive is well enough and if you want or don't like a few things/directions it can be worth addressing those items specifically.

Some bigger examples of things I felt were listened to like way way back when I had asked for a change to materia when it used to blow up your whole gear and have no stat limits (causing melded gear to be both frustrating and weirder in balance), I had described gpose system in the 1.0 to 2.0 era (to the detail of filters, camera angle, and emote control), a small example was Paladin getting a winged defensive skill that players hide behind you for shelter, or asking for summoner to get more grandiose spells and egi (in one of my posts I had described a battery mechanic of using aethertrail to fill up your power to call a larger egi primal like bahamut).

Certainly all of those could have been circumstance though (already planned, or asked by others but I didn't know- like with the other language forums). On that I have quite a few other examples (lots of QoL/other random bits). So its hard for me to feel like they don't listen at all, but maybe I've just wrote so much I've blinded myself lol - still I feel like they listen.