I had a discussion about this a little while back.  Is the distance between the user and the people who develop the application growing? How are distributions part of this gap?

Personally I often notice this distance.

**I receive very very little bug reports. **

You can say this is a good thing, but I doubt it. I know there are bugs, lot of them. Getting bug reports is needed. Needed to fix bugs in parts of GMPC I hardly ever use, also to keep the developer (me) motivated.

Part of the  problem is; bugs are reported! but in the wrong places.

For example check this page on  launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gmpc.

These are not all  ‘package’ bugs, they are bugs in GMPC, that need to be reported UPSTREAM!. I haven’t seen them.

But the same goes for other distributions, forum etc. I once found, by accident, a patch fixing a crasher on debians system. I refuse to go hunting distributions forums and bugtrackers.

Feedback from users.

I hardly get feedback from users. What don’t they like, what would they want to add, etc.

This again is somewhat crucial to improve things.

Reviews.

Reviews like this one here are very nice. But again, nobody ever informed me about it.  Googling on gmpc made me find it one day.

Number of users.

This is more a personal one, I am a bit of a control freak and I would love to know how many users there are.
I wonder what other projects notice? if not, what do they do different?  I know GMPC is a niche product, but still.