“Fix Radar or GTFO” is nonsense
Some people are asking Apple to fix the Radar. They demand a better UI, ability to open and comment on some bugs, integration with Xcode.
This is such a bullshit. Developers do not need a radar. Apple needs it. And they make it good enough for themselves, not for 3rd party developers. If the UI sucks and they get 10 times less bugs than people would love to file, it must be something they are okay with.
I personally, never care much about radar. If I noticed an annoying issue worth filing, I would file a bug in a minute and be done with that. I don’t care about browsing existing issues and figuring out if there’s already a duplicate. It’s not my job, after all. Apple guys should know better which bug contains new info and which is a pure duplicate. They deal with multitudes of product versions and different devices. I just have a couple of devices in some particular configurations.
Radar is a black hole. It would be more comfortable to get a quick response like “yes, we care, stay tuned”. But what for? Apple told us many-many times: please file radars, we keep track of all of them and nothing gets unnoticed. Do you really need this statement to be repeated for every request? I’m happy with “fire and forget” method: I spend very minimal time “managing bugs” and Apple somehow is able to fix the problems over time. They won’t tell you their roadmap anyway, so what feedback do you want after all?
Imagine Apple allows discussing radars in public. Now, instead of that many individual “votes” carefully filed by developers and classified as duplicates by Apple engineers, there will be less individual bugs and those will be covered with less informative comments like “me too” and “+1”. Essentially, that would mean that not Apple, but most active users are now classifying the issues, which makes Apple less efficient in figuring out their priorities. And the “most active developers” is absolutely not the same as the “most paying customers”.
Better UI and Xcode integration. Apple just needs UI suitable for their own comfort, not more. If they make UI very slick and fast, much more people will file the same issues and Apple engineers would have to sort out much bigger pile of duplicate bugs. And do not forget that every feature is a responsibility. Do they really need to constantly spend more time on a fancy bug reporting UI when the existing one works just fine?
Conclusion: file bugs if you wish and forget about them. When submitted, it’s now Apple’s job to deal with them. If you want to participate beyond that (that is, fix the bugs), then you already know what to do.