Stas made a point that I was considering too, although from a different perspective.
One of the issues may be a difference between end user expectations and what the resources are available to fulfill those expectations.
Communications requires time and mental bandwidth, both of which are limited resources for everyone, including WMF staff and end users. Also, there are financial considerations regarding how people use their time.
From the end user perspective, reporting a bug and then having nothing
happen, or getting an initial reply but later seeing that a bug appears to stall for months or years, may be frustrating depending on the nature of the bug and the patience of the user. I think that communicating with users regarding when bugs will likely be fixed would be helpful. I think that some of that happens already, but there's more that can be done. There are probably ways to automate some of these communications to a degree.
On the larger scale, I don't know whether it's possible to get a good large scale understanding of all of the open tasks in Phabricator. I speculate that teams might be able to create semi-automated reports regarding their own teams' tasks. To get a larger view of the situation in Phabricator might require combining the unique outputs of the reports from individual teams. By having a big picture view of the situation I hope that we could improve our collective situational awareness regarding tasks, including open feature requests and technical debt. Also, by creating snapshots of the results of the same type of combined report over a period of months or years, maybe we could get a sense of how technical debt is changing over time.
To summarize: I am thinking that a two pronged approach would be good, one regarding communications regarding the status of individual bugs, and one regarding a big picture analysis of technical debt.
I realize that there would be costs of time and money for both of those approaches. Automation can help with both.
My guess is that managing thousands of bugs in an continuous development environment is challenging in the best of circumstances. I am somewhat familiar with the end user experience and financial considerations (both of which motivated me to participate in this thread), but I'm not an expert in software engineering for a product that is on the scale of a top 10 website.
What do others think regarding these proposals?
Thanks for the good discussion.